Flash's orange vs. HTML5's unripe apple

I've read one too many articles that mention Flash and HTML5 in the same sentence. I'm not sure where this comparison came from, I guess people may be noticing their browsers doing things that were once only possible with Flash, thereby concluding that Flash will fade like the floppy drive. Or maybe they saw a cool demo in Chrome that dismantled their conceptions of what was possible with JavaScript. But as history indicates, there's a long distance between possible and actual, and a deep well between them filled with years of non-standard browser innovations...

Flash back to the early, early days of the web-browser, when getting things to look the same was the least of a web developer's concerns. Using Wiz-Bang features of the most advanced browser (such as IE6) meant forgoing big compatibility and walking across security hazards. At that time, the value proposition of Flash was too good to ignore.

Web developers were used to making congressional-sized compromises to make pages work across browsers, so cutting-edge meant choosing one browser. The dreamscape of platform desirables was so opaque the road map for Flash versions was obvious, as it intended to quell those wants for a reliable common ground, and once achieved, raced forward to meet the demands of an exploding Flash development community. This was a group that had all but given up on communion between the browsers of mortal enemies.

There was a growing skepticism among web media developers that the browsers could offer the capability of a solid 3rd party plug-in embedded within a web page. Furthermore, it would take one hell of an UI to pull all the features together in a way accessible to both programmers and animators. Developers who wanted cool things to work were eager to embrace a solution that tackled *most* of what they needed: light-weight, vector animation, with audio, advanced scripting, that rendered the same across ALL BROWSERS.

In part because of availability (affordable at the college store) and because of the burning desire for the platform to succeed, Macromedia's Flash saw an explosion of talent which both legitimized it and pressured the company to cater to the growing ranks of adopters. Macromedia responded nimbly by ramping up the development of Flash possibly at the expense of their other products (Dreamweaver, Freehand, Fireworks).

The application that began as Future Splash, a vector animation tool for producing web-ready content, was soon leveraged as the end-all solution for media rich pages. Since there was no real alternative to Flash, developers began defaulting on Flash-driven pages, and the software's idealized reputation was tarnished. The lack screen-reader accessibility was never well addressed and there was a growing laziness, a sense of arrogance from the Flash community.

When HTML and Javascript improved enough, there began a large departure from and subsequent vilification of Flash for the dependent strain it placed Internet and her ideals of openness and accessibility. Despite the diffusion of interest, Flash continued to improve by offering solid 3D libraries, video streaming, by expanding into programmatic environments with Flex, and onto mobile devices with Air.

Now, at the crest of HTML 5.0, the new edition of the open-web format seems poised at last to occupy Flash's long-held stakeouts, yet Flash is stubbornly resilient, and spreading even faster with Android devices pledging support. Whatever Flash lacks in platform features it has more than accounted for with the vast pervasiveness of the platform and what it can accomplish in its most basic form.

It's possible that the Web Consortium will muscle together a solid media rich standard, but there are already signs that HTML5 isn't what we hope it would be, and when it is there will be legacy browsers to support.

But my intent here is not to dismiss the value of the new web standards. The point is that Flash is an orange to HTML5's apple. Where developers feel free to target a single browser on a single platform, they could just as well use the new standard to build out. But there's always going to be Flash, and the market is always going to have use for a platform that does less but works in more places. When a new plug-in comes along that can boast the vast platform support of flash, while sporting an Award-winning UI (like Flash's) that integrates with other Killer Apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator, and supports video, and offers advanced scripting w/ debugging, with some 3D tossed in for good measure -- that platform could surely claim the place of Flash. Until then, there will be web pages with embedded flash, and lots of them.