Code in the Sun

So a lot of talk about the death of Flash this month and if you've read any of it, you would know that next month, all the would will embrace as we usher in a new standard, HTML5. It will give us all the power of plugins like Flash, Silverlight, and Unity3D, BUT it will be free, open, and standards based. You may now pour yourself a glass of champaign wile I proceed to ruin your day... 'cause it ain't going to happen.

Full disclosure, I make my living with Flash. And I have heard all of the complaints on the web forums where geeks hang out. Flash is proprietary, crashy, resource intensive, and banner ads use it.

I'll give you a half point each on crashy and resource intensive. Ever since Adobe took over Macromedia ( the original creators of Flash ) they have been way more focused on features than either stability or performance. I think they are finally starting to come around with v10.1 but it is much too little, much too late. Given that, I live in Flash and all I have to say is... quit your whining, it's not that bad. It's certainly not as bad as all of those Firefox plugins you probably have installed. And you have my blessing to install a flash blocked in your browser, I am running one right now.

Which brings me to banner ads. Yeah, they are the worst. But they are definitely NOT going away with HTML5. The HTML5 canvas element was built for banner ads.

So that leaves the proprietary argument. There are a lot of smart people, including me, who think that the web wants to be open and that given the choice, open is always better than proprietary. The problem is that open is slow, reeeeaaaalllllyyyy slow. HTML5 wont be officially ratified in the next year, never mind the next month. Yes, you can use it now, but it's still changing and there are a bunch of different browser incompatibilities. There are also no workable development tools, not to mention it relies on JavaScript which is a tedious programing language at best, so it would reasonably take twice as long for a good developer to code and debug any HTML5 app vs. a Flash app. And probably the biggest issue is that it only delivers the approximate capability of Flash 7, that's 5 years ago. And by the time HTML5 has truely got up to speed as a serious development tool, we will have had at least one, probably two or three new versions of Flash.

My point here is not to beat up on HTML5 because every Flash developer I know is actually really looking forward to it. I don't know any Flash developer who looks forward to building yet another video player. But Flash and similar web plugins are what drives forward progress in web development. The only reason why all of these cool new features are in HTML5 is that they were already in Flash. There will always be a need for plugins because there will always be a need for web developers to push the boundaries. If plugins never existed, we would probably still be using animated GIF's ( I just threw up a little ). I see it as the job of all browser plugins to show us what a standards based web could look like in the years ahead.

Judging but the state of things today, I would say that in five years, we will usher in a new Flash killer called HTML6 which will have true 3D support, a true scripting language ( get lost JavaScript ), one audio and video standard, the ability to tap into computer hardware ( hello full screen mode and web cam usage ), true streaming video, raw binary socket communication, etc. It will be a good day for me because I already have my blog post written ( I hope we still have copy / paste in 5 years ).

i.am