Before You Get Too Twisted about Flash and HTML5

During the past several weeks, the tech press, Twitter-verse and Blogosphere have been filled with news, pronouncements, diatribes and debates regarding the future of Flash. Or more specifically, the death of Flash.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, I would like to suggest that the reports of Flash's death are greatly exaggerated. Not because I am necessarily an Adobe fangirl. Anyone who has followed this blog knows that every so often I have poked at my former employer. But on this topic I think Adobe is getting a bad rap. And here's why.

When it comes to HTML5...Adobe has been watching HTML5 developments as actively as anyone else from the very beginning and continues to be involved in those web standards developments. It's not like this is a surprise. The web evolves because the tools evolve. Today's Flash is nothing like the vector graphics animation program called Future Splash, where it came from. Who knows how tomorrow's Flash will evolve. From Future Splash to Flash-for-animation to Flash for RIAs and beyond...

Remember that Dreamweaver was created as an HTML tool? Why WOULDN'T Adobe be thinking about creating HTML5 tools? A specification - or a standard - is NOT the same as a development platform! Still gotta have a way to create assets that conform to the spec, right??

HTML5 has a long way to go before it is ready for prime time. People need to remember its an evolving standard....which means that some parts of HTML5 are proprietary (or at least not yet published/approved by a standards body) and probably will be for several years. That part of the standards debate doesn't get mentioned so often. So let me repeat: Some part of the evolving HTML5 specification are currently proprietary. e.g. MPEG4's licensing requirements.

Which bring me to a personal pet peeve about this particular debate: The notion that Flash is closed and proprietary, while HTML5 is open. Macromedia and later Adobe have always been committed to extensibility, which means that people can modify and "extend" functionality from the core Flash code. Adobe has published APIs and produced plug-ins. As RIAs have emerged on the scene Adobe builds bridges between open source components.

More recently, Adobe published the SWF specification and have released licensing agreements as part of the Open Screen Project in May of 2008. And even before the SWF spec was published on its way to being released as a standard, Adobe had licensed .SWF to lots of companies. A 2008 survey of Flash tools sponsored by Adobe and conducted by the eLearning Guild showed that 52% of all Flash tools do NOT come from Adobe. Adobe has a lot of Flash producing tools...Presenter, Captivate, Flash Professional, Connect, Flex to name a few. But there are lots of other SWF tools out there, as well. NOT from Adobe.

A few years ago, when it was clear that PDF had become virtually ubiquitous, Adobe released it to OASIS, who approved it as a published standard. Adobe has done the same thing with .SWF and the Open Screen Project in recognition of Flash's ubiquity. No doubt this comes from a position of enlightened self-interest. But in fairness, turning a de facto standard into a de jure standard is kind of a cool thing to do.  The market has already chosen. Adobe is not forcing people down a path where a few others think it ought to go.

One more thing - blaming Flash for bad Flash apps is a little bit like blaming hammers for poorly constructed buildings.

I expect I'll have a few more things to say on this subject. Stay tuned.

Comments

[Yogesh]

I agree with your thoughts on Flash, all this has been overhyped because of Apple blocking Flash on iPad/iPhone. HTML5 would take time to mature as a standard and even after that I doubt if it can replace Flash completely.
Here are my thoughts on why HTML5 is not ready for eLearning development –
http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/05/is-html5-ready-for-elearning-development/

[Clark Quinn]

A few comments:

Scribd is just one example of folks that are already putting HTML 5 to work, prime time or no.

I think folks aren't blaming Flash for bad apps, they're blaming Flash for bad performance.

I've recommended Flash for a long time as the way to deliver interactivity in a practical way (e.g. learning games). The fact that it's not really ready to perform on mobile devices means we need a better solution. I don't really care whether HTML 5 can deliver it, whether Adobe can make Flash efficient, or some third solution comes along, I just care that we have it, because the real game-change opportunity will come when we can deliver meaningful interactivity cross-platform through an app store. That's when we'll have the opportunity to really transform learning.

[Shan]

Very True. In my opinion steve jobs and html5 debates are only making flash famous than before.