Slashdot Mirror
HTML5 vs. Flash — the Case For Flash
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers seven reasons why web designers will remain loyal to Flash for rich web content, despite 'seductive' new capabilities offered by HTML5. Sure, HTML5 aims to duplicate many of the features that were once the sole province of plugins (local disk storage, video display, better rendering, algorithmic drawing, and more) and has high-profile backers in Google and Apple, but as Wayner sees it, this fight is more about designers than it is about technocrats and programmers. And from its sub-pixel resolution, to its developer tools, to its 'write once, play everywhere' functionality, Flash has too much going for it to fall by the wayside. 'The designers will make the final determination. As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.'"
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Okay, now you're just trolling.
Until you can get it to work RIGHT on things like my Nokia N800 and my Motorola Droid (or, hey, the iPhone, hm?) it's not going to be write once run everywhere.
Besides, I thought that was Java's claim to fame and it's definitely not there yet either.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
i understand the arguement, but don't forget about performance and stability.
wait and see how smooth, fast, and stable the HTML5 sites are to the flash counterparts.
give it time.
None of the flash benefits described by the article are impossible to replicate in HTML5/browser/javascript, and it's naive to assume that the new ecosystem wont continue to evolve over time just as flash has.
They are right that the development environment matters. That is not a reason to tell out right lies.
How come the folks at Adobe cannot just change it so that the output is javascript and html rather than actionscript? Does html 5 just not do vector graphics?
This one has multiple fronts. Don't let anyone kid you, this isn't A vs. B, it is at least ABC vs. XYZ where each factor is independently weighed and measured.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Re-create Badgers in Flash. Once you can do that without adding more than 50% to the file size, and you can provide a write-up about the tools you used, only then will HTML5 be ready for prime time. (One comment a couple stories back suggested rendering each frame of the SWF and then encoding that in H.264 or WebM, but that would increase the size far beyond the current 463 KB.)
I already block Flash automatically, as it drags down performance and rarely adds any content.
There are a few cases in which useful content has been designed in Flash, but most of the time it is useless eye candy - and more often than not, just pure advertising. A great way to block most advertising that you do not want is to block Flash. Why would you not want to do that?
Information can be found here.
I hope this helps your GNU effort at software reform.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
K. Trout
No website on this planet is "drop-dead gorgeous"... a woman (or man if you prefer) in real 3D right in front of you and that you can touch and communicate with is infinitely much more "drop-dead gorgeous" even if they are butt ugly.
Besides, I thought that was Java's claim to fame and it's definitely not there yet either.
Java applets lost out to SWF because 1. the Java plug-in takes a lot longer to start up than the Flash Player plug-in, and 2. there initially weren't any tools to author and play back vector animations using Java 2D. Are there now?
The whole point of flash was that the standards were so ignored that designers were glomping onto something, anything, that would show consistently across the browsers. But at this point with Firefox having the market share that it does and the other minor browsers taking on as many installs as they do by being more or less standards compliant, I fail to see why any designer in their right mind would be using Flash where alternatives exist.
As long as it isn't a real standard you're going to be giving up a portion of the potential market by using a proprietary plug in that isn't universally supported. Not to mention the people that block it because of the problems it causes and the abuses of technology over the years.
1.) The boss likes those pop-over menus with the moving gradients, lens flat, the shines and don't forget the rotating image. The ads "pop" and you can never have enough "pop". That's what keeps the visitors coming back. The menu. Not the sites content. [/cynical]
Adobe products have been a vector for security vulnerabilities, and Flash has been one of the main sources of crashes for me in Firefox (along with Acrobat Reader, not surprisingly). I really don't like or want Flash intros or ads. Flash navigation can definitely be done in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Video was always better handled by just letting the browser pick whatever video player you have associated with the MIME type (not a fan of the Flash-based video). I'd definitely prefer to see HTML 5 and SVG take off.
maybe that's the problem. today's web 2.0 crap is what happens when design is taken from the programmer and left with some neo-hippie (or an aging steve jobs type) who cares more about 'flash' than substance.
And I've done my own write-up about these multiple fronts. I've listed three advantages for HTML5 and six for SWF.
Gnash supports old SWF features (up to SWF 7) but not all new SWF features. This means it's good for showing "This page requires a new version of Flash Player. Get the latest version at Adobe.com" movies.
My Counterpoint: The same article, with only 1 flash ad. Otherwise it's 28 Flash ads...
http://infoworld.com/print/125721
But at this point with Firefox having the market share that it does and the other minor browsers taking on as many installs as they do by being more or less standards compliant, I fail to see why any designer in their right mind would be using Flash where alternatives exist.
Because Firefox itself is a minor browser. More than half of web users (and likely more than half of your site's customers) use Internet Explorer 8 or earlier, whose DOM doesn't support all features needed to replace SWF. For example, where's SVG? Where's the 2D canvas? Where's procedural audio?
"Drop dead gorgeous" has nothing to do with the technology being used. That is the weakest argument yet for Flash.
...and I see my CPU getting hit hard (if only briefly) by an IBM ad whose sole purpose in using flash is to have a stupid fucking animation of absolutely no value to me, all I can think is FUCK FLASH. It is the bottom-feeding scum of the web, and I regularly force kill it to free up cycles. If only everyone would get away from it.
I think the number one reason for not going to HTML5 is MSIE. Microsoft has no intention of creating a fully standards compliant browser. If they did that, they would likely also need to make their web based applications standards compliant and that would end their lock-in for Windows on the desktop and server where web applications are concerned. And MSIE is still the major browser out there.
Web developers don't like creating sites for MSIE and sites for others. It's lots of work. Just doing it in flash will assure that the flashy parts of the page will display well on all devices where HTML5 will not.
Now if by some miracle, Microsoft decides to change its selfish ways and gets compliant, that would be another thing entirely. But before anyone moves forward, something has to be done about the Microsoft problem.
I tried sb45demo in Smokescreen in Firefox 3.6 on Windows. There wasn't any sound, and the frame rate was unusably low.
'The designers will make the final determination.'
LOL bullsh*t.The designers don't mean crap in the equation. It is a balance of content providers and platforms. Those with critical mass will drive the technology. The designers will have to rush to the winning side to stay employed.
Someone comes up with an IDE that rivals the Flash tool set that uses HTML5 and Javascript and Flash is dead.
We just had an article showing how you can pretty much compile Flash to run as HTML5 - so, I think this is just arguing for better (Flash quality) authoring tools for HTML5 technology?
I'm still fighting javascript!
Flash is good in that you get a fast (ie interpreted bytecode if I'm getting it) app that draws stuff in the browser, but has additional "local" features available such as talking to some hardware.
The question now is: Do we need that - is that what we want on the web?
If the answer is yes, then let's build our own such thing, one whose spec will be free and entrusted to a consortium that will say what's in, and what's out.
Alternatively, use Java applets.
Also: why is there only javascript for client-side scripting? *shakes head*
Developers will use what their customers use, and their customers use iPhones and iPads, which don't support Flash. Many major sites have already announced their HTML5 support, so I don't see why this guy is claiming developers are going to remain loyal when they're already moving over to HTML5.
You claim that it's a matter of time before we have a Free 2D vector animation editor and JavaScript playback library for HTML5 . It was also a matter of time before Duke Nukem Forever came out, until it was canceled a decade later.
The biggest advantage that the new technologies have that flash has been trying very hard to get into is the ease with which interactive applications that integrate well with the browser and backend services can be developed without having to pay huge scaling licensing fees to anyone. The designers are certainly critical in making applications look good, but they don't get to decide what technologies the system is built on, they have to work with what they are given. If the requirements are that the webapp does X, Y and Z which flash cannot do, then it doesn't really matter what the designer would prefer to work with. They will be forced to work with what they are told to work with. If the need for good tools is great enough than the development of said tools will inevitably follow.
speaking of "Websites" with a capital W, I only have one thing to say...
flashturbation
The future clearly should be Qt. It runs just about anywhere, from mobile devices to PCs, and it has bindings to numerous other languages (besides its native C++), and it offers a huge number of features, and it's true open source software.
It's pathetic that in 2010 we're still wasting our time with stupid and shitty products like Flash and HTML5 canvas.
Qt's networking classes make it extremely easy to write network-aware applications. It can integrate with existing web services with almost no effort on the developer's part.
Once you've used Qt, you'll never want to go back to web development or Flash development ever again. They end up feeling so primitive and outright stupid compared to what Qt lets you achieve.
As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.
[citation needed]
if HTML5 canvas with javascript wasn't worth using, then why did adobe already update their products to export to them?
i don't view the web using a flash browser, i use an HTML browser... HTML will obviously win.
The mobile web is getting an increasingly larger chunk of the pie. And in the predictable feature, the majority of the mobile web will be not flash-capable (think iPhone OS, the majority of Symbian). So, no, flash is not "write once, play everywhere" any longer.
Flash being a plugin has one big advantage - it can be filtered. This allows me to avoid the most annoying ads - those with sound and animation. And for those sites that need it, I can turn it on. If/when everything is HTML, separating content and annoying extras will be a lot harder.
Developers will use what their customers use, and their customers use iPhones and iPads, which don't support Flash.
Developers will use what their customers use, and their customers use PCs running Windows and Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8, which don't support HTML5 <canvas> but allow easy installation of Flash Player. Even IE 9 might not get <canvas>.
I started to pray that Flash would die as soon as they took away the user controls that let me stop the idiotic flickering, bouncing, annoying ads.
Flash being a plugin has one big advantage - it can be filtered. This allows me to avoid the most annoying ads - those with sound and animation. And for those sites that need it, I can turn it on.
NoScript being an addon has one big advantage - script can be filtered. This allows me to avoid the most annoying ads - those with <audio> sound and <video> or <canvas> animation. And for those sites that need it, I can turn it on.
Here's my two cases for Flash:
Homestar Runner
MS Paint Adventures (the current story, Homestuck, has some amazing timed animation/music segments done in Flash)
Now, yes, Flash could be replaced with someone else. But, as of right now, the animations are done in Flash, not anything else, and I'm still going to visit them (Well, maybe not H*R if they keep not updating, but the long-awaited End of Act 4 for Homestuck ought to be awesome.) There need to be the tools to do the animation work that are as good (to the artists/etc.) as Flash, not just the capacity to play them back.
'As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.'
Well that seems to be the main point right there. It's about the tools, not the tech.
So let there be tools. Nice ones. I personally find working in Flash a pain, because I don't like the tools that much. But then, I'm working with an Eclipse plugin.
"But while SVG is impressive, it's still a long way from efficient, thanks to all of the extra characters the XML standard insists upon..."
Thats stupidity of the same order as the "tubes" comment and as hilarious as "i can tell because of the pixels, and i've seen a lot of 'shops...".
1) I stopped reading at that point, and it was in the first paragraph.
2) It is InfoWorld. Garbage is expected.
The article is just a troll. I would love a /. filter that removes all stories that reference certain websites, just as much as it is needed on digg and google. Certain sites never have any worthy content, and really don't even need to be seen no matter what the search.
Gnash is, well, pretty crappy. It's slow as heck, doesn't sync audio properly (mostly because it tends to render way too slowly and doesn't know how to frameskip right), and can't handle most nontrivial Flash content. It appears they've ditched the OpenGL backend (which is poor anyway), and the AGG backend is uselessly slow at nontrivial output sizes. I've had better luck with the two years abandoned swfdec than with Gnash. It really ought to be a lot better by now.
I've seen people create weird Flash-player-ish things in a few days or weeks that seem to do lots of things better than Gnash. To me it sounds like the Gnash devs just don't really know what they're doing. Personally, I'm hoping that lightspark will finally become THE decent open-source Flash player.
How about flash sucks because it doesn't include a volume controls by default?
That's all it takes to trump that idiotic article.
Don't get me wrong, there are many other reasons to hate flash, (Including some of the reasons identified in the article as reasons to use flash: Flash's sub-pixel resolution and anti-aliasing and Flash's supercool fonts ) and that's not even the biggest one. But its more than adequate to just beg for that POS to die.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Flash isn't going away anytime soon.
That being said, HTML5 is the future. CLIs for consumer OSes went away for the large part, but they're still around. Batch mode processing went away for the large part, but it's still around. Procedural programming went away for the large part, but it's still around. Java for interactive web interfaces went away for the large part, but Java for the front end is still around.
All of these things have found niches somewhere. Sometimes due to stubbornness of developers, sometimes out of sheer necessity. Some problems are entirely procedural, and really can't be object oriented. Some problems are best left to go into a batch. Java as a browser front end is still around because some developers aren't comfortable with AJAX and dynamic HTML or comfortable with Flash.
Now it's Flash's turn to go away for the large part.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Reason No. 5: Flash is write once, play everywhere. Flash 10 support on Wii? Nope. Flash support on Nintendo DS? Nope? Flash 10 support on Android 1.6? Nope. Flash support on iPhone/iPad? Nope. There's everything from Flash 7 to Flash 10 out there in the field; saying you can write something for Flash ten and have it "play everywhere" is blatant bullshit. Plus, some devices simply don't have enough memory to run bloated Flash apps! Flash apps takes a long time to load because they are BIG. Sure, embedding fonts in the app is a great idea -- if you don't care how big the app is.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
is because it's only as good as Adobe implementation on your platform, and they and they alone decide whether your platform is worth sticking money/time into to make a better flash player. It's not a standard. Unlike a browser, no one else can go out and decide to make a better flash player (gnash ignored).
My 1.67Ghz G4 Powerbook to this day can only play flash videos extremely choppy and games hardly at all. It can play downloaded video or DVDs just fine.
I really wish flash advocates would stop saying "write once, run anywhere" until Adobe actually releases a Linux flash player with quality on par with the Windows version!
Truly, if you're a Flash developer/designer/artist who only tests on Windows, and there obviously MANY out there, you have no idea what a completely buggy piece of shit Abobe's Flash is on Linux. On all but the largest of sites, even trying to play video on many sites other than youtube and vimeo, Flash regularly crashes the entire browser. Yeah, Linux API are a moving target and audio is notoriously messed up, but there's no reason any plugin should ever completely lock up the browser, ever!
In reality, Adobe Flash is "write once, runs well only on Windows".
As a Linux user, I'm glad Apple is causing Adobe so much pain and I hope the horrible code that is non-Windows Flash becomes unnecessary someday. Alternately, Adobe could write a quality Flash player for Linux, but that seems to have a snowball's change in hell, especially with this horribly wrong mindset that Flash actually works well on anything other than Microsoft Windows!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I think there is something to be said in a single sandboxed platform like Flash/Silverlight being available on all hardware types to bring a guaranteed level of consistency/performance across the board. If someone designs an app in flash/silverlight/etc. they know with high certainty that it will perform and look the same way on all platforms supported by the plugin. If history is to be trusted for extrapolative purposes, the various HTML5 implementations will not offer that kind of consistency. Although, since many of the browsers use the same engines nowadays this problem is somewhat mitigated. Still, I like Adoble/Microsoft having great incentive to make sure that Flash/Silverlight content displays the same on all platforms. The browsers don't really have the same incentives. Their perfect, desired situation is to have their rendering of HTML5 vary slightly from the other contenders, and hold enough marketshare that web content is designed around their quirks, and not their competitors quirks. Its a bit of a conflict of interest, IMO.
Those of you who hate Flash on the internet and are good with HTML5 and JavaScript really need to head on over and help out the team working on Gallery:
http://gallery.menalto.com/
For the second time now, they've given up trying to do things "right" using Javascript and are throwing in the towel to implement core functionality using Flash instead:
http://gallery.menalto.com/thanks_adobe_flash_builder
They claim they just don't have the skills or manpower to figure out how to make Javascript do what they want, so they're just using Flash since it's easier. I'm not the only Gallery user to have grave concerns about this trend.
Though much of his reasoning is sound, I'm not sure I agree with the author's conclusion. My reasoning for expecting it to go differently is fairly simple: while Flash blockers are generally the most popular plug-ins for any browser that has the option, you generally don't see many HTML blocking extensions in a web browser. Once the corp. world realizes that, I believe value of increased eye-balls-on-ads will be the dominant factor even though Designers will have to re-tool.
Users will switch to other browsers if the use case is compelling enough.
Not if they're at work or at the library, therefore not an administrator, and thus can't install another browser. As I wrote in my essay about HTML5 vs. SWF:
The problem with HTML and Flash is that each of them is badly integrated with the other in all browsers. Flash is too much of a "black box" to HTML and to content digesters (like search engine indexers). HTML in the same browser is too hard to access from a Flash object. That bad interface between the two is the main problem.
And that's mostly Flash's fault. The HTML has a DOM and an extensive API to it that the Flash plugin can access. But the presentation of that API inside Flash is not easily programmable. Flash's language is ActionScript, which should be just another interoperable dialect of JavaScript (they're both variants of the ECMAScript standard), but you can't just include JavaScript in Flash apps or vice versa. The browser's inability to speak (even a binary compiled version) of ActionScript is a limit of the browser, but that's Flash's fault from differing from JavaScript with no valuable reason. The JavaScript API is not entirely standardized across all browsers (or even the major ones, Firefox/Safari/IE), which is a flaw of JavaScript, but that just means both sides of the incompatibilities have changes to make.
Maintaining the bad interface is a point of leverage for each of HTML/JavaScript and Flash to work to protect its status quo, to force the other side to change. But the fragmentation of the platform is costing both sides more than they'd gain by "being the boss".
Both Adobe and the browser developer projects should bury the hatchet, and make a single, unified, bidirectional API that can be programmed in the same language from either side of the interface. Most of the moves to get there have to come from Adobe. With HTML5 arriving, and the contest between HTML and Flash becoming truly epic - and epically wasteful - now is the time to get it together. We don't need another decade fighting over this only to get hard to program hybrids that are hard for people to use.
--
make install -not war
...some one comes up with something even "simpler." When that happens, and I'm betting it will, developers will drop Flash like a lump of burning, rabid plutonium. Perhaps some easy-to-use html5 toolkit, or whatever.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
i'm a "web designer" and i avoid flash whenever i can. so, no.
As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet
I don't know about gorgeous, but I've seen lots of drop-dead websites. As in websites that cause my browser to "drop dead" and my CPU fan to whir like it is about to fly away.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Ha! Hardly. Many times the Flash player does not even render the same in different browsers on the same machine.
Although it has its flaws, Flash filled a gap that existed when there were few to no alternatives to producing content rich websites. As the web has matured there has become to exist more of a desire to have such dynamic content become standards based, thus supported and developed by the web community as a whole, without the need for additional plug-ins and players implementing proprietary technology.
I liken this to FAX vs e-mail. Online FAX providers aside, for the common user, most of the time its infinitely more convenient to simply scan and e-mail a document than it is to use a FAX machine to transmit the same document. With traditional land lines disappearing, this is becoming even more the case.
We always seem to drag legacy technology into the future and complain about how hard or how much of a burden it is to learn new technologies, which usually provide many benefits over the older technology. As fundamental human nature, people are simply resistant to change and stick with what they know. Look for this battle to drag on for some time to come.
Flash is woefully buggy as heck. Face facts, it only works good and does not shield the respective host systems from its weaknesses. Endless loops that sap power from the host machines occur regularly. All of it can be fixed, but Adobe just does not get it when it comes to sheer quality.
Now James Gosling, he knows how to make a bullet proof host environment with a similar type of state machine. Hire him to fix Flash and even Apple will be happy about it.
Plus perhaps James Gosling can get Flash recoded in a tight small team to actually even work natively in the Android Browser on a G1, that would prove it can work on iPhone with no problem given a chance.
Until then, HTML 5 will take all the thunder.
Rescue Flash? James Gosling is currently unemployed and unchallenged! Adobe, just recruit James Gosling and hand him the keys to the Flash kingdom with authority to absolutely rule upon its quality with his name splashed on it for reputation quality control.
Bingo Bango Enough Said...
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
I see your crystal galaxy, which I'll admit was surprisingly good, and raise you every single Flash animation and game on Newgrounds.com.
In any case we know that the HTML standard evolved to meet designers needs, and CSS was added, and now the web standard can provide the level of control that the OCD developers and PHB need, and so now we have much of the web written for the standard based browser, not IE. Even IE has changed.
This move from IE did not happen overnight, and, arguably, was not driven by developers. It was driven by users moving away from IE and those pages not serving standard based content losing page views to those that did. I understand that it took both good standard based tools and a shifting user base. Back in the late 90's I worked on IE only sites. It was pretty necessary to gain the conformity that users and the PHB expected. OTOH, many of those sites are now out of business.
I see the same thing happening with Flash. Other standard based solutions will be possible as the work is done to package typical solutions in a simple form that the average web developer can apply to general problems. Like IE, the average developer will not move from Flash until the PHB see a drop in users due to (allegedly) Flash poor performance on the sub-compact machine drives users to sites that gives them a more positive user experience.
I don't see Flash going away soon, but I do see the several use scenarios disappearing. In particular, I see video content wrapped in a Flash package going away. As soon as people figure out how to do obnoxious ads in HTML5, I see Flash losing significant market share.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And from its sub-pixel resolution, to its developer tools, to its 'write once, play everywhere' functionality, Flash has too much going for it to fall by the wayside.
What write once, play everywhere functionality?!?!
" the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites".
This here is the dangerous part; thinking that the tool makes the designer. Anyone can produce crap with Flash tools, and all it takes is a stroll through the Web to witness first-hand how much damage Flash can do in the wrong hands.
However I agree that the "designer" will have the last word. And, for as long as Flash allows a graphic designer with no knowledge whatsoever of web practices, standards, and a minimum background in actual computing, to build and "just upload" a website, instead of collaborating with someone who knows what he's doing, we'll be doomed to suffer crap like this.
There is no such thing as a "Flash Website". A website has to be in (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. You know, Web standards.
If you make an empty web page with a huge rectangular hole for your Flash object inside it, it's as good as an empty website from the point of view of non-Flash devices, search engines, people on dial-up, people with slow computers and everybody using a non-Windows computer. Because Flash sucks on anything that isn't a Windows PC.
If management decides to purchase a subscription SaaS application to do X critical business function, and it requires Y browser to run, they will order the IT department to find a way to install it enterprise wide.
This already happens, except that the publishers of subscription SaaS applications have traditionally set Y browser == Internet Explorer 6, not 7, not 8, and definitely not Chrome or Firefox. Companies that already use such an app that requires IE 6 will choose other apps that allow IE 6 so that the IT department doesn't have to waste time==money keeping up with security updates to multiple browsers.
The point is: nobody wants to run bloated software anymore, and Flash certainly is one of them. This is THE thing that makes everyone's computer slow, and also THE thing that has one security hole every day (or so). It is also extremely badly supported in open source platforms. Once we got HTML5 and video support for sites like youtube/dailymotion/vimeo, then really, there wont be any point in taking care of all the issues we are having when installing or upgrading Flash. The issue is not about the functionality of Flash that, by the way, are quite cool. It's all about the so poor quality of the product itself, that will make everyone so happy to jump into HTML5.
A good rule of thumb is that if the project name is a pun and either uses "gn" or a recursive acronym, it's just there so FOSSies can masturbate to their cleverness and not to provide any useful functionality.
I don't get it why could not simply have both: HTML5 and Flash. Preferably with Flash that is better integrated in the browser than with the current API.
My humble opinion: On a mobile device flash should be avoided. Sometimes it consumes too much power. It does not easily cope with small screens and changes in resolution, e.g. when the device is rotated. And regarding to touch it does not integrate well with the rest of the system. And on most devices it seems only be available in a very limited version. But on "real" PCs it is a very nice tool for rich multimedia web sites.
This is why I use HTML6 on a 1000 Gbps Net2 IPv6 backbone.
Because it makes the poorly coded Flash apps faint with jealousy.
Real coders have already made the leap to the real Net2 - it's only you in the backwaters like the USA that use old archaic IPv4 over sub-standard 20 Gbps Net that even bother to use Flash.
Now excuse me, I have to check on beamtime.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And it again reverts to a question of when rather than if.
Not necessarily. Java has had Java 2D since Java SE 6, yet nobody has made an IDE for making animations and an applet to play them. So why would others do in JavaScript what they haven't done with Java in the three and a half years that Java SE 6 has been around, especially when IE 8 doesn't support <canvas> and even IE 9 might not?
If designers really got to make these decisions, IE 6 would have died a long time ago and we'd all be in CSS heaven. Designers, like us developers, ultimately have to design for what's out there. Right now, that means both mobile devices (that don't have flash) and IE (that doesn't support HTML 5 so well) so neither is the silver bullet.
The gotcha there is that HTML 5 is gaining traction and flash is losing traction. Also, thanks to exCanvas and RaphaelJS, MSIE can more or less fake canvas and SVG. It's pretty clear which is a better platform to start migrating towards.
Personally, I hope Flash lives on as a great ecosystem for animations and games and that it dies the quickest and most painful death possible on all other accounts. I wish just the death and pain on IE.
The whole point of flash was that the standards were so ignored
Seriously? That was the whole point of flash? It was a common rendering/layout engine?
Man, someone should have told Macromedia back in the day. It would have saved them all that work on the motion/vector graphics engine, integrating multimedia codecs, and coming up with their own scripting language -- all they had to do was write a browser plugin for most browsers!
Tweet, tweet.
Perhaps you suffer from the belief that the brushes make the painting?
Besides, are there any straight page websites left? I pity the person that needs to maintain a cms-less pile.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Check the stats: http://www.w3schools.com/
W3Schools is known to be biased toward web developers, who are less likely to be using an outdated IE as the primary browser compared to a company that has standardized on the version of IE that a particular subscription SaaS application requires.
IE is still only at about 53%
Throwing away 53% of your potential customers is what we in the business word call "suicide".
which is not what I'd call 'well over'.
Google Analytics on my employer's web site show IE a bit higher than 53 percent, though I can't give an exact figure due to NDA.
who the f**k is James Gosling?
The fact that garbage like Badgers exists on the web at all is strong evidence that we need to leave Flash behind.
The fact that Flash-haters and HTML5 partisans* also think Badgers is garbage is strong evidence that they're not only wrong about most of their arguments, they're also joyless buzzkills.
Tweet, tweet.
The fallacy in this article is that designers are the ultimate arbiters of how a web site gets built. It's just not the case. If I am paying the bills and I want to reach the largest possible audience, my first instruction to the designer working for *me* is going to be to avoid Flash, Java, and anything else that is plug-in dependent like the plague. Flash sites are inaccessible to the vision impaired, they are not generally searchable, they are prone to breakage when plug-ins are out of date or non-existent, and they are generally not maintainable by the organization they were created for once they are delivered.
Sorry, but sticking with standards based solutions and tools that manipulate open formats is the way to go if you, Mr. Designer-boy, are working for me. In a market-driven economy, designers are a commodity, not an industry force. They're gonna do what they are paid to do.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
10. New language specification / programming paradigm
HTML/JS and several frameworks in, one must wade through several stages of Flash development to gain proficiency in yet another toolkit for delivering content.
9. Text
Your text and tags are hidden, perhaps exposed through clunky mechanisms. Search exposure and SEO are a nightmare. Forget about clipboard compatibility.
8. Version incompatibility
It may not happen as often due to Flash's relative stability, but plugin upgrades will still happen. So, consider yourself coding around several versions if you're using anything new.
7. Perceived vacuous content
More often than not, the New Shiny of vector graphics overwhelms developers and they deliver more gee-whiz than any real content. Transitions, animations, endless gradients all polish up something that might be more easily just text.
6. Ever-shifting browser performance levels
These days browsers are increasing their performance, with today's beta version rivaling complete OS responsiveness of just 10 years ago. Flash may have a native code advantage, but with tighter lock-in of graphics hardware to a browser's rendering engine just around the corner, the advantage of native code running as a 3rd party plug-in will not be as necessary except for the most intensive games.
5. Security
As browsers & their tabs run in more sandboxed areas with each round of security lockdown, Flash is a gaping hole of unknown security. Adobe has not always be forthcoming of closing their known issues. JS holes are well-studied, open to all for review, and usually fixed in short order.
4. Agility
Adobe's release schedule doesn't converge with any particular browser's and the support of a new browser feature may require still more waiting if you're to using it from within Flash. By using a framework - or several - one would expect patches/extensions to arrive and mature more quickly than a single vendor.
3. Openness
When using an open JS framework, you can continue to dive until the issue you are researching is isolated and in plain sight. With a native plug-in, you may get to the undesired behavior of an API and be stuck with working around it or skipping it's use altogether.
2. Market acceptance
Like it or not Apple is refusing to run Flash. Other emerging platforms may or may not jump on this bandwagon. Proven over and over, sticking to the core platform of a delivered browser and it's open standards is the best bet for long term viability for a site.
1. One not Two
Every site is going to be using JS anyway - do you really need to carry data between the two layers? Just stick within the lower-walls of the garden you're already in rather than constantly embed and marshal.
I think it will be hard to sell a technology that shows up as a blue lego brick on the simpleton device of choice... and then there is the (in)security of Flash... but it's still to be determined how that plays out in HTML5 with their device access and local storage...
Bow before me, for I am root.
The 7 reasons really just boil down to 2:
I think everyone knew this. The first point will go away with time. The second one is a known issue that will either prove to be a significant problem, or not.
You want to know the most basic reason I despise Flash? It breaks the back button.
The fundamental problem with Flash, is that end user-experience and preferences are totally ignored. Yeah, maybe it's nice for developers, maybe it's nice for content providers -- but it totally sucks for users. Why should I bother to choose a browser and customize it, if Flash is just going to come along and ignore the buttons and menus bars, play me music I don't want to hear, autoplay video when I'm trying to read another part of a page?
The problem with developers who choose Flash, is that they don't give a damn about the people who use the sites they create. They are so caught up in being clever with action script that they've forgotten the most basic principles of design.
There are plenty of ways to create "drop-dead gorgeous" sites that also abide by browser conventions, don't crash a Mac, and don't fuck with the preferences and minds of the end-user. Anyone who thinks they need Flash to do that, is a piss-poor designer, or an arrogant dick.
I may not agree with all of Apple's reasoning in banishing Flash, but the user-experience one is very valid. I welcome their decision to punch Flash in the face with this. I will rejoice when the Internet is a Flash-free zone.
We do NOT NEED Flash. Just as Real Player was once the best and easiest way of getting audio and video on the net, Flash can die just as fast as they did -- and for exactly the same reasons. Real did not give a fuck about their users, and neither do most people working in Flash.
Flashbock is the best piece of software development in the past 15 years. Nothing of value is lost by using it. Nothing of value is lost by using an iPad.
This is journalistic hype. For some reason the journalist like these "X vs Y", "Y killer apps". Even wen all the facts are right (not often) the whole idea is off by a littel.
HTML5 is not a flash killer, and the point of HTML5 is not to replace flash, HTML5 is just the next version of HTML, a version with all the nice things we think will help to make the next set of awesome apps.
HTML5 is not tryiing to "beat" Flash, because Flash is not even on the same game. Flash is on a different game than the World Wide Web. Wen we access a Flash movie, we are rendering something that is not hypertext, is not stored as text, can't be examined or modified by webmasters or modified on the fly by something like Greasemonkey. Flash is not playing by the rules of the World Wide Web, is outside the field, is not even a option, and has NEVER be a option for the Web, just a complement to the web, to make things that use to be imposible with HTML. Since the web tools are being on a process of un-crapppyfication, there will be more and more that can be done with HTML, so the marginal need for Flash will be smaller and smaller.
The Flash people has never ben able to convince the internet that we really need this plugin, never has made his way to a WC3 standard. Since the adoption of Flash is almost 100%, why no big game site, news / shop or other type is made completely in Flash?
After all the years, the lack of a single big website made completely in flash make blooody obvious that Flash is not a option to make websites.
I would "love" to be wrong, and see a big site made completely in Flash, and have more success than all other websites on the internet. Even Youtube is made of a glue of html + Flash. Even Adobe Flash site is made in HTML. If Adobe don't eat his own dog-food why the world has to eat it?
Again, my point is not to kill Flash. It will be nice if Flash grown to something more interesting, I don't think is feasible, because are based on the wrong, ideas.. but.. he!... as a completement to the internet, has his uses.
-Woof woof woof!
'The designers will make the final determination. As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.'" I am a designer and I stopped using flash years ago. I don't see it being used by my fellow designers who care about web standards either. you can easily get all the interactivity that flash offers by using Ajax / javascript and a little bit of creativity. Flash is going to die. no matter what the fanboys think. It will die and it needs to die.
HTML5 faces the same problems as HTML & CSS & javascript currently have - namely that the webpage code looks completely different depending on which of the sixteen million different web browsers it's being viewed in. Until such time as ALL browsers render the code exactly the same way (and we all know that will never happen) there will always be a need for a specialized technology (whether it's Flash or whatever) that actually does display the content the way the designer meant for it to look no matter what browser it's running in. And of course Flash content that was created specifically for a full-size, full-screen webpage (at 1024x768 or 1600x1200 resolutions, as examples) doesn't 'work' on a tiny 300-pixel cellphone browser - so stop whining about it and use a real computer to surf those sites. You use a Wii or Xbox to play games specifically created for those platforms, not a dipshit cell phone.
Any real operating system, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux and Solaris, makes it extremely easy to create sandboxes or jails for native processes.
Now hold on a second... This is something I've done a little bit of research into, and from what I can tell it is not easy to create a really safe process jail - at least not on all of those systems - unless I've missed something... (And don't get me wrong - I believe in this kind of approach - maybe not for quite the scenario you're describing but I believe jailing a process is a valuable and important feature - which is why I looked into the options in the first place...)
There's chroot(), of course, but that only limits filesystem access (not network access, at least not on Linux where net devices are "special" and exist outside the filesystem hierarchy) - plus my understanding is that they're not really escape-proof. (Been a while since I looked into all the details there...)
BSD jails sounded promising - and I guess there's a Linux implementation available as an add-on kernel module... I think my main concern about this approach was that the use of a full VM environment just to jail a process seemed kind of excessive - but, on the other hand, such an approach would be safer than trying to block or filter system calls...
ptrace() can be used to allow one process to filter a second process's access to system calls - but dealing with fork() calls without the newly-forked process escaping is a problem...
seccomp is (I believe) Linux-only, and it kills the jailed process if it tries to do anything other than read from or write to previously-opened file descriptors... So it's rather limited in what it can allow.
If you know more about the subject than I do, please enlighten me.
As for most devices using one of a few types of CPU - I guess, then, the next question is, can ARM CPUs create the virtual machine environment that would be needed to run a BSD jail? Or would such platforms have to rely on a jailing procedure based on syscall filtering or something like that?
Personally I think a good, cross-platform bytecode is a better choice for executable web content than compiling executables for numerous platforms... I think it's a better sweet spot between ease of development and efficiency than either script code like Javascript or multi-platform native code like you suggested... Even just dealing with multiple browsers is fairly frustrating at times - having to deal with multiple compilation targets for different architectures and testing them sounds worse. Plus this reduces the barriers to switching to new architectures as they come along.
Bow-ties are cool.
The Web is becoming increasingly unusable to the visually impaired as a result of the adoption of Flash. That's a reality that deserves special attention.
I see no reason to support technologies that make web-pages non-declarative and difficult to use. The Imperative web is dangerous, and provides us with constant security threats, slow and crashing browsers, Rickroll bombs, and vendor tie-ins that are difficult to escape. The vanilla web may lack in some features, but really - do we WANT the web to be a big scary application?
omg, it might become a meg!
That's why I called it a test case. I did the math on a few other, longer memetic SWFs, such as "Hatt-baby" and "Hyakugojyuuichi" and "We Drink Ritalin". It turned out that a 2 MB vector animation rendered to pixels and compressed with H.264 Baseline or WebM would become a 20 MB video. People with monthly transfer caps on the order of 2 GB per month might not appreciate that.
...I'm going to have to disagree. I know Flash, and have used it, and I hate it. It's awkward to update and maintain, is terrible on bandwidth, and requires expensive software to work with.
I try to implement less flash and more advanced/modernized CSS3/HTML5 techniques paired with ajax. It's not only easier to develop and maintain, but is more accessible and can degrade gracefully if the user disables Javascript.
Most elements on a standard website that currently use flash are either easily converted to CSS and HTML or completely unnecessary. Flashing logos and obnoxious, noisy mouse-over effects do not increase your sales!
Flash itself is really very clever. The player packs an incredible amount of functionality into a very tiny executable. It's only 1.83MB. There's an animation engine, a JIT compiler, a video player, an audio system, and a multichannel download manager.
The problem is what people use it for. Which is mostly either ads or lame web sites.
Nobody really bothers doing Flash animations as entertainment much. If you've never seen one, check out Thugs on Film. Flash games remain popular, although Shockwave, which has full 3D capability, is a far better game platform. Many console games use Flash for 2D interface elements, typically using Adobe's authoring tools but a non-Adobe player. (Yes, there are non-Adobe Flash players.)
But it's not Adobe's fault that the content sucks.
According to Wikipedia, IE is barely over 50% -- not "well over" as you claimed. And Firefox is now over 30%, certainly not a "minor browser" anymore, with more than enough market share to force web developers to pay attention. In a few days when the May totals come out, IE will be even lower. Check the page again to see for yourself.
So where does that leave you? Out of date, that's what.
This won't happen very quickly, but if HTML5 is basically capable of doing about everything Flash can, then I expect that Adobe will eventually just phase out the Flash player? Why? They don't make a nickel off the player - only the tools. Adobe has always been about the tools. While it will probably take some work to convert them, their developer tools should, it would seem like, be able to be modified to output HTML5+JS instead of Flash.
They can keep making money on having the best developer tools, while not having the costs of maintaining Flash.
There is one counter-argument, though, which might be persuasive to Adobe's management - they might not like being in a position of being 'just another vendor' in a level playing field where any company can develop HTML5 development tools. The control they have over Flash player does mean that they can kind of lock developers into their tools, instead of using someone else's tools.
Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see how this unfolds.
You slashdot nerds are so goddamn clueless.
I'm an artist/geek. Think about this from my perspective....if I want to make "art" -- something interactive with pictures, animation, whatever.... What the hell else am I supposed to use? Sure, I guess I could pick up "real" programming... but that's obviously not my core-competency. I could use some kinda "dumb" programming language -- I dunno, VBA, Python, whatever... but what good would that do? I can't put it up on the web.
Director and Flash are the only real ways that a "non-programmer" can make interactive "art" in any way that's useable by the mass-public. And sure -- I guess Adobe will support HTML-5, but that's friggin' Dreamweaver -- that's for making "websites" and not interactive artwork with animation and whatnot.
Ok, so maybe I suck and maybe my artwork sucks... but so what? If 99% of the shit out there sucks, but 1% of it is any good, that's the same as any other website, blog, what have you.
Until there is a viable alternative to Flash (and there isn't yet), Flash will still rule among artists & designers... the very set of people that propelled Flash to the forefront to begin with.
Once you can do that without adding more than 50% to the file size, and you can provide a write-up about the tools you used, only then will HTML5 be ready for prime time.
Prime time. For the sake of making Badgers.
I might suggest you look at the suitability of HTML5 based on usage scenario rather than as some quality of universal readiness.
Designers HATE Flash. HTML stems from traditional typography layout languages. Designers have been used to and comfortable with that format for over 5 decades. Flash is NOT a designer-friendly environment. It's a motion graphics and video editing-friendly environment... if it's friendly at all. Flash was made popular by the geek teen crowd for making crude animations, and has been picked up by some websites, which more-often-than-not, use it in garashly over-elaborate ways. It's a hack. That's all there is to it. It's buggy, it has compatability issues, and often slows down or prevents users from accessing content that they could have just as easilly gotten with HTML.
As long as I've been a designer and a user, I've hated Flash. I've crossed my fingers from over 5 years ago and hoped that it wouldn't catch on. Thankfully, most of the big sites stay away from it, and that is a credit to their sense of simplicity in design. Flash is just too unstructured.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I stopped reading after this sentence...
The designers will make the final determination.
On what planet? Everywhere I've worked, the process works like this:
1. Non-technical management decides they want something done, though they are unable to define it clearly.
2. The resulting vague "specs" land on the desk of one or more designers, who produce mockups, usually in something like Fireworks (if you're lucky) or PowerPoint (if you're unlucky).
3. Steps 1 and 2 repeat several times as management and the designers both try to avoid making any decisions they can be held accountable for.
4. A bunch of pretty pictures, quite possibly in the form of actual printouts, are delivered to the developers who are asked, based on what was common knowledge in meetings they weren't invited to, to build the program that the pictures would represent if we lived in a parallel universe less ruthlessly ruled by causality and determinism than our own.
5. A three-way feedback loop, now involving management, the designers, and the developers continues to mutate the "spec" while development proceeds in the face of an arbitrary and inflexible deadline chosen by an even higher level of management by reading the cracks in tortoise shells roasted over the sacred fire in the executive restroom.
In this scenario, the designers are not making implementation decisions. Those decisions are made by equally unqualified middle managers based on vacuous trade journal articles like TFA and then imposed without discussion upon the developers.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Flash is so much of a dinosaur it doesn't realise its already dead...
Prime time. For the sake of making Badgers.
I chose it as an example of a work of vector animation with which a lot of Slashdot regulars are likely to be familiar. If you aren't a fan of this specific work of vector animation, there are thousands of other vector animations on Newgrounds.com that I could recommend.
I might suggest you look at the suitability of HTML5 based on usage scenario
Watching audiovisual works that have been created using vector animation techniques is a usage scenario.
Why is it no one talks about layered audio when praising HTML5? I've got this silly but fun idea in my head to fully emulate a Boss DR-110 drum machine in Flash. It's not terribly complicated, and I could probably do a LOT of it in HTML and Javascript, except when it comes to audio playback. Granted, I've only done cursory searches, but from what I can tell, playing back six channels of audio simultaneously is not something I can easily do in HTML5/HTML/Javascript. Major show-stopper, that.
The other nice thing about Flash is that I can easily block it. Yes, with Greasemonkey you can block out HTML as is necessary, but NoScript is so much easier to use off the bat.
That's not even touching on technology like Flash Media Server - are there any equivalent server packages that would be as functional in delivering content to HTML5 applications?
I am Leviathant and I approve this message.
This is pretty insightful. Yes, I think the Flash era is ending, and it will be over at the latest by the time that developer tools for web-standard animation/video are as good as what's now available for Flash. Adobe would be smart if they got ahead on this and made their present Flash tools output something other than Flash. That way they could keep a lot of their customers, perhaps indefinitely, after the Flash era ends. If they don't do this, someone else will take them.
Smokescreen. It replicates every feature of flash. From what I've seen, there isn't a smidgen of quality difference.
As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for lazy designers producing drop-dead gorgeous websites that don't scale well, make right-clicking useless, and bookmarking impossible, they'll keep their place on the Internet.
FTFY.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Offtopic" either, asshole.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes, that's a fine example case for vector animations, likely familiar to most here, perhaps reasonably representative of the works found at Newgrounds.com -- I've never been. I do like the Badgers animation, though. Very nice.
Yes, animations are a usage scenario. But there are a large number of uses for Flash/HTML5. I'm suggesting you look at the range of uses, distill them into a few categories, and discuss pros and cons in the context of each. Otherwise, saying "HTML5 isn't ready for prime time" is overly broad.
Not sure I would call it a "web"-site. ...
* Does not follow web-standardisation (or AFAIU standardisation of any kind except "install our plugin")
* Cannot be display solely by a web-browser
* Though it may be pretty-looking pictures, it breaks most everything else that is good about the web
* Global Indexing and search
* Browser-integrated navigation (middle-click to open in tab...)
* Accessibility-extentions
* Mashable (and configurable in other means, like design-adjustable for aspect ratio and similar)
*
"Flash"-site is a more apt name for it.
"write once, play everywhere"???? Huh? Show me the case where this is actually possible on every platform for flash. It isn't. In fact, it's MORE justifiable to say "write once, play everywhere" for HTML5 than flash. come on people... turning into pure jibberish now.
Perhaps you missed it before, but Microsoft is very much interested in backing HTML5
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Whether you like it or not, Flash is here to stay:
http://smokescreen.us/
For iPhone/iPad users, it just runs a lot slower now. :)
The point is the development tools are awesome for Flash and support the Designer -> Developer synergy necessary to get good looking apps/sites out there.
All the reasons given in the article are valid, but to understand why those reasons are valid, you need to have been involved in the design process, and more importantly, tried taken a design through the development process and tried to argue why SIFR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement ) is a bad thing, but still have to implement it.
Default deny is the best solution...for the 1% of the population that can put up with it.
But what's the difference between SWF and HTML5 in this case? What makes you think that A. significantly more than 1 percent of people can tolerate default deny of SWF objects, and B. only 1 percent of people can tolerate default deny of <audio>, <video>, and <canvas> elements?
Make it possible for so many non-programmers to produce animations and games easily, and I'll jump away from flash, its performance and stability on Linux being what it is.
Until then, long live the crappy, cpu-intensive, unstable flash.
No, that was offtopic - the topic at hand is HTML5 vs Flash, not moderation abuses. For what it's worth though I do agree with you, there's no way that post was a troll.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Would it be a troll if in response to someone complaining about Vista's slowness I was to suggest that the buy a new machine? I think it would be, and I think suggesting that similar web bloat be fixed by a faster internet connection is a perfect analog.
All Slashdot moderation is a scam. The only way to beat it is to setup filtering at "raw" and ignore it.
Reason No. 1: Flash's sub-pixel resolution and anti-aliasing: Seriously?
From TFA:
The spec does allow floating point numbers, but the numbers between the integers tend to be ignored or rounded off in a slightly different way by different browsers.
The solution, then, would be to improve the way browsers handle this. Besides, why are you doing pixel-based layouts anyway?
For reason number two, TFA says:
Some browsers are fast and some are slow. Some operations are quick on one browser and sluggish on another.
That's being worked out, and again, there's choice. With Flash, some things are quick on one OS/driver combination, and slow on another.
To make matters more complicated, not every browser implements every feature in exactly the same way, a problem that shouldn't be surprising to JavaScript developers. There are good efforts to simplify this with intermediate libraries like Processing.js, but even these can't handle every combination.
Not for long. Flash is something which attempts to be cross-platform, as in, works on Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, etc. Browsers are a hell of a lot more similar than OSes. If Flash can do it, JavaScript libraries should have a much easier time of it.
The author flat-out admits this:
Flash isn't immune to the complexity brought to us by the proliferation of operating systems and browsers, but it has been dealing with them for much longer. When the Flash plug-in doesn't crash, the results are slicker, smoother, and more consistent.
And of course, sometimes, the Flash plug-in crashes. And anywhere but Windows, the results are certainly not slicker or smoother. And nobody's mentioned SVG.
Point #3 I'll give them, but TFA also mentions:
Adobe is hedging its bets and building HTML5 support into Dreamweaver so that you can continue to use Adobe's tools and enjoy the flexibility.
And I wouldn't doubt there will be other tools just as good or better.
Point #4 -- totally agree. I'm always annoyed when I see Flash-ified headers, just to get the fonts right.
Reason No. 5: Flash is write once, play everywhere: More like write once, play anywhere that runs Flash.
Whereas HTML is write once, play everywhere that has a decent web browser -- for which you have multiple options.
Reason No. 6: The Flash commercial ecosystem: Ok. I don't know if this is an actual benefit, or if you lose more support through being semi-closed than you gain by having some commercial support.
In fact, I'd call it a detriment -- why would I go for a proprietary photo viewer over an open one? It's not like my website is just a photo viewer, is it?
Reason No. 7: Flash's game engines: I don't get it. Why is he talking about "Born to Run"?
#7 is a joke. He's just saying if JavaScript wants to be taken seriously, someone should make a JavaScript game "engine" and call it an engine, instead of a library.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you're talking about features or applications, "Linux" means the entire distro. If you're talking about bugs or vulnerabilities, "Linux" means just the kernel.
"As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet."
Who cares about "drop-dead gorgeous"? Can someone show me a site using Flash for its major content, that isn't totally f@#($ing God-awful?
Major uses of Flash today, as I see them:
Anything else? As soon as HTML5 is well-supported, I can't see any good use of Flash besides games, and even there I imagine that HTML5 will make inroads.
My bicyles
many options for those obnoxious supercookies
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/
Flash-based websites are *notorious* for being the worst-designed in the industry... Doesn't everyone agree on this, or am I really that sheltered? Maybe the designers have sheltered themselves as well, actually believing that the Flash garbage they produce is usable. As far as I can tell, most Flash websites are produced by people straight out of their Flash courses in school with little real-world nor usability experience. I admit flash (currently) has its uses, for streaming video, audio, or web-based games, but *never* as a means to actually design an entire website! Absolutely never. These sites are always horrific. Designers should never be programming in the first place. They do the art. Leave it to the programmers to do the code. Let each be an expert in his or her own respective field. Flash will die eventually, but it does seem like it will be a long and painful death. At least we're moving in the right direction!
Just had to comment on why most of the sites i work on are flash;
My work process flow begins as follows:
1. Customer gives a brief for a site to the ad agency.
2. The ad agency creates a design based on the brief
3. The customer approves the design
4. I get the design accompanied with a quote request
These days, most of the designs that i receive describe a flash site. Like, at least 9 out of every 10. As long as the customer pays, i do as he says.
Flash sites also practically pixel-perfect on different platforms - this is essential when you are trying to manage a brand on the web.
There are also a few essential features that essentially cannot be done on the web with other tools - for example a multiple file upload with progress meter. And please, don't say "signed applet".
I agree with the author for the most part. He makes some compelling arguments for Flash. However, in the long run, I don't think you can ignore the fact that Apple and Google are both pushing HTML5. That being said, HTML5 itself has its own issues. I've written about it in this blog post: http://www.virtusa.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/html5-is-it-ready-for-prime-time/ (sorry, not sure of the etiquette in posting a link to my own blog -- just thought I'd provide additional info on a related topic)
Seriously?! Program in Java much??
Jon Backstrom
So many people equate Flash with video and silly animations. That is unfortunate because Flash is more than video, and a lot more than the HTML DOM. It is a rich programming environment - it has 2D, 3D, audio, camera support, fonts, animation, and 1000 other things I don't know. Does HTML5 really have all that? Is it already ubiquitous? If so, I'm both impressed and surprised.
I worked at a company who developed a business application using Flash. The first version of the app was AJAX, but it was horrible to maintain and very limiting. So they moved to Flash using Flex. It was a real application. I can't even imagine trying to write a fully-blown app like that in Javascript. I know Google essentially does that with GMail, but they have had to develop a lot of custom tools to make that possible.
"The designers will make the final determination"
I highly doubt that many designers will get away with "yes, I know it does not work on iPad, where your primary demographic lives, but the tools for Flash are so much easier to use!"
I think the summary nailed it...
Google and Apple will make the final determination. (Then Microsoft will find some type of innovation in it.)
In any case it is a monumental task to even care about replacing the steaming POS that is flash.
Then we will all breathe the same sigh of relief, similar to when a useless politician who won't go away, dies in office. - dammit! I crossed that line again!
When talking about dynamic typing, what most people mean is dynamic member dispatch - i.e. being able to call method "foo" on any object that has it without knowing its type.
In other words, duck typing, where the entirety of an interface is the name of a method, as opposed to interfaces with names that in turn contain the names of multiple methods. Python is one language that has this, but in fact lately it has been trying to get away from duck typing; witness the deprecation of isCallable(), isMappingType(), isNumericType(), and isSequenceType() in favor of interface-like abstract base classes in Python 2.6's new collections and numbers modules designed for testing with isinstance(), which acts like a Java cast or a C++ dynamic_cast.
Look it up, guys.
It being “InfoWorld's Peter Wayner” (who’s that anyway?) does not mean that it’s not advertising.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
... to my web browsing. I frequently have as many as 20 different web sites up in various desktops and windows. One bad flash site and POOFFF!!! ... all my browser windows go bye-bye. And bad flash sites are numerous. Bad Java sites that cause this scale of problem are very rare compared to flash. So it's actually not been a problem to leave Java enabled (only one Java related crash this year, so far). So I just won't run flash because it is just too dangerous. And it's not much of a loss because most flash content isn't useful (maybe pretty, but not with information). Compare that to PDF. That's another crappy format. But there's a huge amount of useful information in PDF format that makes it too hard to avoid. To be safe I don't install it in the browser and just download PDF files and read them offline. Do that for flash and I MIGHT reconsider.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
HTML5 does not have the capability to access the webcam and the microphone on the desktop. That is a pretty serious problem considering the number of people who use this feature regularly.
The other MAJOR "feature" that Flash has is that it can be installed as a plugin in pretty much *any* browser - so if you are stuck with using IE6 because of some enterprise app which doesn't run on anything else, it will still be possible to install the flash plugin on the browser - that makes Flash far more ubiquitous that HTML5 can ever hope to be in the next 5 years.
innovation!
http://www.riagora.com/2010/06/innovation-and-flash/
Or perhaps you are missing the point that HTML5 is not adequate for every purpose, at least not yet.
So...what, exactly, are these restaurants trying to do that Flash does for them, but HTML5 cannot?
Sure, there's a lot of animation and fancy stuff you can do in Flash for games and cool videos that HTML5 can't easily do yet. But for simple navigation? For displaying a menu that they scanned in?
The way I look at it, the difference between Flash and HTML5 is, at worst, like the difference between MS Word and Mac OS X's TextEdit, a clean, simple rich-text editor: for 99% of people's needs, TextEdit is more than sufficient. It can handle writing essays and papers for school, résumés—pretty much anything that you want to do with styled text and inserted images, it can do. (Probably some other stuff, too, that I've never needed to do). No, it can't do full-fledged layout for brochures, flyers, books, etc, and I don't think it can do equations and footnotes and such for scholarly papers, but most people will never need to do those things. (Not to mention, Word doesn't do them particularly well or understandably...)
Similarly, the things that Flash does that HTML5 does not yet do well, most websites have absolutely no need of. (Some of them, such as replacing the cursor with a Flash animation, no website has need of, but that doesn't always stop them...) Sure, Homestar Runner or Super Mario Bros Z wouldn't have been created with HTML5, at least not with the state of the tools and support for it as they are now.
But that doesn't mean that Flash is necessary for normal websites.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
You essentially throw away type information and safety altogether, which is not the case with dynamic typing.
Could you explain the underlying difference between "dynamic typing" and "erasure" in more detail? I appear not to understand.
Keep burning your mod points, Flash haters. It won't change reality, or move your delusion that HTML5 just as good as Flash any closer to reality.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"1.67Ghz G4 Powerbook" is a flippin macintosh you idiot, its not designed to run well, its designed to show the Apple logo to all your oh-so-stylish friends.
But Flash isn't "play everywhere," and the cause of that problem is the very reason that Flash still hasn't really become a legitimate standard: there's only one single completed implementation of it, and it's proprietary. That means that the one single implementation hasn't been / can't be audited, and has only been ported to a handful of platforms (the ones that Adobe happened to want to market to).
When there are more completed implementations, it will start to gain the potential to become "play everywhere." And if one of those completed implementations happens to be Free Software, the chances of it becoming "play everywhere" will be vastly improved. But is it actually happening in real life? It's been several years since I tried out GNU's version, but it wasn't there yet when I did. Perhaps you know something I don't (and yes, that's very possible).
Compare this to HTML5. There definitely will be several implementations of that, all over the place. HTML5 is almost certainly going to be a standard not just in name, but in practice. HTML5 will become "play everywhere" in a blink of an eye compared to Flash's long history of failure.
People say Flash has a spec and therefore is just as good. But show me the interoperative implementations. The real world proof kind of crushes all the arguments that Flash is ready. Now: why hasn't Flash been implemented yet? Hey, I can't say. Maybe there's a subtle flaw in the arguments that the existing spec is enough, or maybe it's simply a matter that nobody has ever cared enough about Flash to do it. Either way, though, that's a bad sign for Flash's future, and a totally damning sign for Flash's present.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
... that makes those fancy little arrow keys on my Mac mini's keyboard work with Flash applications on the web (regardless of Browser). That one seems to be stumping Adobe, and has been for quite some time, so maybe other developers can step in and figure it out for them. Oh, wait, only Adobe makes the Flash 10.1 plugin. Damn.
--- What?
... but AdBlockPlus doesn't depend on an ad being Flash-based to block it. It blocks by hostname - so if you hit www.cnn.com, and that web page tries to pull in ad content from www.punchthemonkey.com, AdBlockPlus recognizes that site as an ad server, and blocks it. No matter what the form of the ad is. The only real way around it is to have the ads come from the same domain as the actual content, which is apparently tricky to do.
Excellent point and example.
Some of us are more responsive to being pulled in with theatrics or a roundabout approach. Poetry and music and comedy are extremely effective ways to communicate and almost never do it in a way that is the fastest and most direct.
The goal of sites is to communicate something. Sometimes to communicate you don't say things directly. That's why comedy and satire work well on serious topics. Because they are a method of getting the point across creating an impact. If Flash troubles people, it's the person creating the experience that didn't do it as effectively. But I've seen it done very well. Flash has the benefit of a timeline and a designer canvas to help non-programmers get certain things done.
If anyone thinks most people prefer to get their answer in the quickest way possible, you've failed to notice all of the entertainment and pastimes of our culture(s). Ask somebody whether they'd rather watch their favorite team play a game in person, or just read a scoreboard later. Humans appreciate nuances and to spend time with something as much as they like things fast and easy. But bottom line, Flash is not going to help a boring-ass banking or public works site become super-awesome. But it's very useful to a lot of content used in big and small spaces.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
> HTML5 does not have the capability to access the webcam and the microphone on the desktop.
It's coming. See http://www.w3.org/TR/capture-api/ and I know Gecko is experimenting with this sort of thing.
the video playback is heaps smoother, with much less cpu time used. but it wont do fullscreen, so i'm stuck putting up with flash, and its lack of hsynced silky smooth full frame rate playback. even at my fullscreen (mid range these days) 1680x1050. to be running a p9500 with 4gig of 800mhz ram in a latitude e6400 (yeah intel but the hdm4500 is better than a 6year old low range nvidia, hey thats a compliment for intel integrated), im underwhelmed by flash.
Type erasure strips away any metadata about the type
In Python or JavaScript, once you've assigned an object to a variable, the variable itself doesn't have any metadata other than that the value is an object reference. All the metadata for the type is in the object.
(Integer)o is not a type-safe cast.
True, C casting of pointer types and C++'s equivalent reinterpret_cast are unsafe. But in Java, (Integer)o is a checked downcast. So is C++'s dynamic_cast<Integer *>(o) if you haven't turned off RTTI. It returns a null pointer if o is not an Integer.
lol. gotcha. ;)