Is HTML5 Ready To Take Over From Flash?

The Flash platform has been taking body blows lately. First Apple, then Scribd, publicly abandon it; now ARM's marketing VP is blaming a delay in ARM smartbooks on the continuing unsuitability of Flash for the subnotebook market. But how ready is HTML5 to take over from Flash? Tim Bray offers a cautionary appraisal of the not-yet-a-standard's state of grace. While Flash may be on the way out (or so legions of its detractors hope), it is still important in many corners of the Web. Here a branding expert demonstrates that the sites of 10 out of 10 leading worldwide brands don't display on the iPad — because they're coded in Flash, of course.

Comments

i've seen javascript slow down my machines

[alen]

played with Google Wave late last year and it's javascript heavy. with a few public waves on the screen i've seen my browser memory usage jump to around 500MB. this is on all browsers. IE8, Chrome and Firefox. so it looks like a choice between RAM hungry HTML5 and CPU heavy Flash

Re:Why should anyone care about scribd?

[amentajo]

Yeah - they used Flash to display documents, so I never got to use the site. Since they're moving (moved?) content distribution to HTML5, that sentiment might be reversed now.
Scribd documents show up relatively frequently in my Google searches; I may have to start training my eyes to stop avoiding links to scribd.com.

Re:See, this is what I've been saying on Slashdot

[naz404]

People fail to see one very very big factor in the silly HTML5 vs Flash debate:
The web is ruled by web DESIGNERS and not developers/coders.

Unless someone comes up with a tool that does the same dynamic websites, animations, vector image drawing etc in HTML5 with the ease that non-coder designers can do in Flash, you won't be seeing Flash dying anytime soon.

Moreover, Adobe is in the business of selling creative authoring tools and not directly with Flash itself.

As such, with HTML5 as an emerging standard, Adobe is now going try to make the best darn-tootin' tools for creating HTML5 content according to Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch.