Lately, there has been much hoopla about the battle between Flash and HTML5. Anyone in the Flash community will tell you that the new features of the Open Web are still years behind Flash Player and other plugins. However, I believe that the amazing passion currently growing within that community can lead to exciting opportunities and new innovation. Advocates of the Open Web are currently trying to show that Flash isn’t required in the browser, and I encourage them to compete strongly in the coming months to prove their assertions.
To succeed, to knock Flash off it’s throne as the strongest innovator in web technology, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript need to be pushing out new versions much faster. When did HTML4 come out? Not in this decade. Consider the way everyone has been talking about HTML5 and CSS3 so much lately. I’ve seen so many cool examples that show the improvements over HTML4 and CSS2. To me, it seems like most of the big decisions have already been made. Yes, it may be a while before the standard is officially approved, but the important stuff is there and browsers are implementing things like mad. That’s so awesome!
With that in mind, I strongly suggest that we all should begin thinking about the next versions of Open Web tech very, very soon. You know why? Because Adobe generally has an 18 month release cycle for many of its products. Flash Player will continue to improve with cool new features, and that’s what keeps developers like me sticking with Adobe’s infamous plugin. I’m not saying that HTML needs the same duration for a release cycle. Standards are finalized at a slower pace for good reason. However, I strongly believe that HTML and all of its open friends have been stagnating for far too long, and that the release cycles have been slower than they should be.
Every browser vendor has been committing to new features like crazy lately, and many have been inventing new APIs that greatly improve the web. Keep that up, guys, because I’m impressed. However, I think one extra bit of effort should be combined with all this new stuff. Start throwing things into a bin that will eventually become HTML6, CSS4, and ECMAScript 6. Maybe not immediately, but I think 12 to 24 months from now, the most interesting features of the upcoming Open Web should be considered ready for the majority of smaller websites, and six months away from appearing on major web portals. At that time, developers should be just as excited about HTML6 and other future tech as they are today about HTML5.
I’m a Flash developer, and I’ve been one for nearly six years. I love Flash, and I hope that it continues to improve for a long time to come. However, I understand the role of the open web, and I want to see it follow a similar path. I do not see any sort of epic opposition between Flash and standards. In fact, I think that plugins like Flash Player and Silverlight can help to drive standards by being a test bed. Still, I see excellent opportunities for more friendly competition between plugins and web browsers, much like browsers compete among themselves to provide the best user experience for visiting our favorite websites. However, even with all the passion that has recently grown within the Open Web community, I think that there’s a chance that everyone could all settle down again and leave those technologies in limbo for a while. That would be unfortunate, and I encourage anyone who supports the idea of an Open Web to advocate for quicker standardization and to push for continued innovation in the very near future.
I think it’s great with competition and it seems sensible that HTML has some kind of audio and video tags.
But I don’t think that open standards ever will be able to keep up with the cutting edge. There is just no chance that HTML will evolve to have the capabilities has today within the next decade. Probably HTML5 will not be accessible enough to use other than as an alternative for some applications for many years to come, and it’s expected to reach recommendation status 2022.
I agree that the foundation of the web should be open. A big part of the Internet will always be about simply presenting information accompanied by some graphics, and the technology for that will not need to be updated that often.
When it comes to things like games and rich applications you many times want the latest technology, and it will always be offered by platforms such as Flash, Silverlight or Unity3D, since they will have a faster development progress.
My hope for the future is a diversity of tools and formats available, and I very much doubt it will turn out any other way.
I’ll ask this essential question again…
Why the hell would a Flash developer use HTML5?
HTML5 has the same problems that all so-called “standards” have. For business reasons, it will NEVER be implemented consistently across browsers and platforms. JavaScript programming is trial and error to see if what works in Browser A also works in Browser B. It’s a freaking nightmare. I’d rather be a plumber than have to write different code for 7 different browsers.
Professional Flashers understand that Flash is not just about cool tricks and animations. Flash is THE ONLY WAY to achieve cross-browser and cross-platform consistency.
Flashers – this is the argument you should be making for Flash. It’s a slam-dunk. Proprietary is good in the case of Flash. Don’t be bullied by the standards zealots.
Unfortunately the open web is not something that can simply be driven forward by a grass roots movement of talented developers. Standards can only be standardized when large companies like Apple and Microsoft agree to them.
Talented developers showing standards bodies real problems being solved with non-standard, experimental features probably have more power than you think, adampasz. The greatest part of the current momentum in the Open Web is that many of the features started out as non-standard extensions first implemented in only one browser.
“When did HTML4 come out? Not in this decade.”
– nor did it come out in the last decade either 🙂
– nor did it come out this century.
– nor did it come out this millennium!
– hehe.
Flash has so many users. Some users need to study new script and then can use HTML5. So I think it is not easy to let flash disappeared.
bannersky, I agree to a certain extent. Changing from ActionScript to JavaScript wouldn’t be a big barrier at all. The two languages have similar roots, after all. However, figuring out how to do many of the complex things that we take for granted in Flash’s display list instead with HTML5’s canvas will definitely be a big problem for many Flash developers.
Hey Josh,
It has been a long time! HTML 5 is the perfect solution for many organizations that have long used Flash as an army swiss knife for web advertising, banner ads, audio/video.
In the enterprise software market, my organization works heavily in dashboards with Xcelsius, Flex, and AIR. The ability to compile a single SWF that can be deployed to a web page, re-purposed as a RIA, and then also live inside of a PDF, and now to Android is something that I don’t see HTML5 ever accomplishing.
This area of RIAs, Games, and specialized web applications are not given any attention by larger media outlets and blogs. So the question is if this area is so insignificant compared to the future of web video and the Adobe vs Apple circus that no one cares about these important use cases for Flash?
As someone who once worked in the enterprise space and now has a game development practice, you have experienced two completely different worlds that use the same Flash technology with great success. Can you see yourself re-building something like Xcelsius and your games using HTML5 and Java?
Hi, Ryan. Yes, it’s been a while. Actually, I can see Xcelsius being built in HTML5, CSS3, and JS. You couldn’t release it tomorrow, since HTML5 development is still in progress across all major browsers, but once the current expected features are deployed widely enough, I think HTML5 could definitely replace Flash for that kind of data viz. Even Microsoft is finally getting off their ass and doing things right in IE9, so they won’t slow things down much, except with the worst of the worst enterprise customers.
Let’s assume that the magic moment is near, where HTML5 has enough penetration to be useful for more than just tech demos. I don’t know when that date will come, but I think it’s sooner than some Flash developers think (and a little later than some HTML5 advocates hope, but that’s a different story).
Everything you need could be deployed in a single HTML file. No need to load CSS externally, and all graphics could be Canvas or SVG. In the worst case, if you absolutely must have images, they could be Base-64 encoded in the document and loaded with data URIs. I see no problem developing all the components and the calculation engine in JavaScript. Performance in JS engines is leaping forward in big ways. They’ve got to be faster than AS2 now (which was good enough for Xcelsius), and they will probably surpass AS3 (I think a couple do in certain situations already) because Adobe doesn’t seem to be speeding up their own VM in response… yet (maybe I’m wrong, but no one has said much about AS3 speed in a long time, so I’m going to assume Adobe has been doing other stuff instead).
An app that does as much as Xcelsius would be passed around far and wide by HTML5 advocates, especially if it offered a stunning visual design. It may not reach all enterprises immediately, but it could get a good start with excited early adopters just for being a great example of a hot new technology. For that reason alone, I say the company who made this hypothetical Xcelsius clone could easily get acquired by Google/Apple/Microsoft or someone else with big pockets looking to pick up some smart people or a good product to continue developing. Oh man, maybe I should get started on that one. 😉
For all the same reasons, games could be done in HTML5 too. There are many new game frameworks starting to pop up, and I expect that momentum to continue. As a game developer, I’m a little worried about that because HTML5/JS is a lot easier to manipulate. Not because I’m against people seeing my source code and copying it in their own games, but more because it will become a lot easier to rip out advertising, remove external links back to the author’s website (or to a paying sponsor’s site), modify scores and other data (cheating), and stuff like that. Perhaps good minimizers and obfuscators can help, though. I’ll be watching the evolution of HTML5 games very closely. I want to see if they can find ways to continue with the monetization options currently available to Flash developers or if they need to change business models.
I’m not an HTML5 convert, by the way, in case anyone might think that as a result of these posts talking so highly of the next-gen web. I still know many capabilities in Flash Player that aren’t available in browsers, and they probably won’t be until long after HTML5 is widely deployed, if ever. By that time, Flash will probably have new capabilities that continue to push innovation on the web. That’s what plugins do best, and I can never dislike Flash (or its successor plugin, should one replace it in the hearts and minds of developers) because otherwise open standards would be even worse off.