Flash vs. HTML5 :: posted by Sean Ashcraft

I'll start with a quote from Steve Jobs obtained by Wired from an unnamed source not authorized by Apple to speak with the press:

"They (Adobe) are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5."


Quick sidebar - as a Mac user since the original Apple II (the Oregon trail days were awesome) I can say that Flash has never crashed my Mac, and I use Flash almost daily.


We touched on this briefly in class so I wanted to dig deeper and find out what the story really is. Truth be told, the story really depends on who's telling it.

Here's what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen had to say when asked about what HTML5 means to Adobe:


"...to the extent that an improved HTML standard accelerates innovation and consistent reach for web content, we’re very supportive and clearly from the perspective of our tools, we will support the creation and management of HTML content to the level that they want.

I think it speaks increasingly to the realization that rich Internet applications and delivering engaging experiences is increasingly important to all of our customers. I think the challenge for HTLM5 will continue to be how do you get a consistent display of HTML5 across browsers. And when you think about when the rollout plans that are currently being talked about, they feel like it might be a decade before HTML5 sees standardization across the number of browsers that are going to be out there.

So clearly supportive in terms of making sure as HTML5 is evolving that we will support it in our web authoring tools but from the perspective of continuing to drive Flash and innovation around Flash and rich Internet applications, we still think that actually the fragmentation of browsers makes Flash even more important rather than less important."

Looking for a more unbiased view of the debate, I found a post by Jeremy Allaire, the co-creator of ColdFusion.

His quick answer to the versus question was this, "I’m often asked 'Will HTML5 replace Flash?' on the Web. The quick answer is no. However, there is a lot of nuance here and it’s helpful to make the distinction between two broad classes of content applications that are deployed in browsers."

What I found is that there is no clear cut winner. At least not yet.

What I really wanted to find out though, beyond the video debate, is what the capabilities of HTML5 will be. We use Flash to create animation, video, etc. Can HTML5 do this? Will we be able to create vector-based animation in HTML5?

This is the most comprehensive article I could find on HTML5 and its capabilities: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/16/html5-and-the-future-of-the-web/

Flash is so much more that just a means to play video online. It doesn't look to me that we'll be designing in HTML5 the way we are in Flash right now. I'm sticking with Flash, and though I'm a lifelong Mac user, there's no iPad in my future until Flash is supported.

There is so much information floating around from so many different sources it's hard to sift through it all and come up with a concrete conclusion. Case in point, this is another great article: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/26/html-5-now-or-never/

Bottom line, in today's world, without Flash support, users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.