Apple has shown with the iPhone and Webkit, with HTML+CSS based UIs inside the iPhone version of Safari that it’s possible to build compelling UIs for millions of users without using Flash or Silverlight. I’m not impressed at all by mobile Flash applications, Flash Lite and attempts to bring Flash&video to mobile devices in the past years.

I think Apple made the right decision to not install a Flash Player on the iPhone until now. Flash Player 10.1 might change the situation, based on the performance shown in first demos of mobile versions of the new Flash Player.

But then: Who is using a Flash based email client, and what limitations did Flash have – until the release of Flash 10 – rendering text within the browser? How long did it take to implement Unicode support, support for other alphabets and text directions?

We can’t change the situation we have today, with a smaller percentage of very modern browsers, and then many companies and users still equipped with old versions of IE. But the evolution of browser based technologies in the past years has clearly shown that a situation where one company dominates areas as much as Adobe did dominate the world of browser based animation, video, multimedia and convergence is not good for us. At the same time the creative tools developed by Adobe provide a lot of value to many creative people in areas like web design, UX and interaction design, game design, etc.

A huge step ahead for the open standards based web would be the release of visual tools for building modern UIs and user interactions – at the same time providing an integrated workflow for design, interaction design, UI engineering and application development. Creating highly interactive and animated UIs for the browser should be possible without deep knowledge of JavaScript, CSS and coding. And that’s an area where Adobe does a pretty good job (not a surprise when you realize that Adobe/Macromedia/Macromind have a total of 25 years of experience in developing timeline-based animation tools).

fair enough: Lets leave out the hyperbole in your title and my Twitter reaction

I still think that you assert way more than what follows from your argument but I agree that my point is much weaker if I leave the title out of my considerations.

@JulesLt:

I don’t think anyone says that standards committees are a good venue for new inventions. That’s not how the W3C works, though (ok, it sometimes does, but it’s not supposed to). Features get proposed by private entities and included into the standards if enough vendors express interest in them. A very good example are CSS transitions (
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transitions/), which were first introduced into WebKit by Apple and then proposed as a CSS3 module.

The point about ActiveX is quite interesting, never thought of that.

Ok, enough rambling, now I’m off to releasing 1.0 of SwiftSuspenders, my first substantial open source contribution for (gasp) the Flash platform

There are lots of examples where standards work – OpenGL is a good example, USB, Ethernet, or PostScript & PDF to pick two controlled by Adobe.

The problems with web standards are more down to the difference between the de facto standard (IE) and the specifications (although some of the blame does lie with specifications that were ambiguous in the first place).

Nor should we forget that while people use both technologies for RIA now, their original intent was very different – HTML, and even early CSS, were not intended for graphically ‘perfect’ layout – if anything, they were intended to make the same information accessible across the wide range of machines people were using at the time.

Flash and PDF started from the opposite direction – consistency to the designers intention.

At some level, that is in the DNA of the two approaches.

I do agree with the point that evolution is more likely to happen outside the ‘standards’ route.

We only need to look at things like XMLHttpRequest and Canvas as examples of proprietary vendor driven extensions to HTML that have later become key ‘open standards’, for instance, and the whole WHATWG/HTML 5 thing is another example, of where a bunch of vendors had to bypass the official standards process.

(Oh, and if Flash hadn’t existed, ActiveX would have been more widespread than it is. And I really doubt Microsoft would have bothered with x-platform/CPU versions).

@Sameer, I agree, I don’t think HTML5 will ever overtake Flash in features. And I don’t think they should try, it won’t work with their model. As @Timothy and @Matthew both note, we’ve been working on the HTML spec for a long time. We’re not going to stop innovating and Flash still provides value.

@Till, thanks for commenting. While I agree the title of the post is a bit….embellished, this is the internet, so that’s the nature of the beast.

When you take out the implication in the title, I think the argument still stands. I do absolutely think Silverlight had a huge impact in how Flash has evolved. H.264 support is a great example. It wouldn’t have gotten into Flash as quickly as it did without Silverlight.

I also think you put too big a burden on the customers. Without Flash *maybe* customers would have started to demand more features in their browsers or switched to ones that support it, but I have a hard time seeing that. Do customers have any concept of HTML5?

I feel like the success of Flash hasn’t been driven by customers, but by developers who wanted to deploy better content. Some of that is possible with standards, but it takes a lot of work (a subtle point in the post). Flash lowered the barrier to create that kind of content and showed how the web could be. That, in my opinion, helped the standards community rally and start to innovate with HTML5.

=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com

as I already said on Twitter, I think that this piece has an unfortunate slant to it. Mike (Chambers) rightly pointed out that I should comment here, so I’ll try to expand a little on what I meant:

The word “deceptive” with which I described it earlier, might be a bit harsh, but I think that the argument you make isn’t sound and that the headline is very misleading.

Most importantly, “html5 wouldn’t exist without Flash” simply doesn’t follow from “historically, Flash inspired many of the features now found in html5-capable browsers”. Let alone the much stronger “can’t exist”.

One might well argue that browser evolution would have been faster if it weren’t for the Flash Player: Customers might have demanded advanced features earlier and with more pressure if they didn’t have the Flash Player as a solution to their demands.

Note that I’m not making that argument, because it would stand on equally shaky grounds as I think yours does.

An argument of the same structure, and one I don’t think you’d be happy with, is the following: “Some of the features in Flash Player 10 couldn’t exist without Silverlight because Adobe only added them because of the increased competition”. I guess the exact analogy to the first part of your argument would be “Flash Player 10 can’t exist without Silverlight”. I think that sounds silly, don’t you?

The second part of your argument as I understand it is that the Flash platform, in addition to inspiring html5, helps making development of complex web apps feasible by providing a fallback solution for IE users. That argument, too, can be turned on its head, and I think in this case, the upside-down version makes much more sense: If it weren’t for the Flash Player the fallback solution it provides for IE, the browser landscape might look somewhat different, with much more people switching to more capable browsers simply because they want to use web apps for which no IE version exists because it wouldn’t be feasible to develop one. As it is now, this is a relatively recent trend. In an alternate universe without Flash, it might have started way earlier.

Please don’t get me wrong: I know that you’re not mindlessly bashing html and are generally pretty fair when it comes to comparing it to Flash. (Which I really appreciate, considering your job!) I just think that this piece is much less balanced than it poses to be and makes rather strong assertions on very shaky grounds.

If you look at the various HTML5 mailing lists and chats, or just blogs summing up the progress of HTML5, there’s a lot of arguements going on between developers, with lots of controversy over various decisions that’s made. Open standards are great but because of all the people and organizations involved there’s a lot of disagreement, so progress is always so incredibly slow. Of course once decisions are made, the next step is to actually get all major browsers to agree on using the specs correctly and then many DHT goes into creating different implementations of the same features.

I’m sure there’s people inside Adobe wanting to push Flash in different directions, but because of the way things run inside a corporation decisions are made a lot more quickly and we see the innovation happen with new players.

Which I think furthers Ryan’s point, as I think the evolution of HTML would be even more chaotic without Flash to point to as an example of what is working. HTMl5 is going to take years to finalize and is still not to par to what Flash Player 10.1 can do. By the time new features found in the current version of Flash are added to say HTML6, Flash will be a lot further along to what it is now.

Great post! Way to take on a taboo topic head on

You make some interesting point. In the end, I’m betting it primarily comes down to how many talented-developer-hours (talent * # of Developers * number of hours) gets put into each platform.

Right now, I suspect that the flash platform has a heck of a lot more TDH’s than HTML 5 does, simply by virtue of how many years worth of TDH’s Adobe and Macromedia before it put into the platform, so it will certainly take a lot of time for HTML 5 to catch up.

On the other hand, HTML5′s openness has a lot allure too because of the possibility of how many different people can get something back from putting TDH’s into HTML5. IBM, Sony, John-charlie’s-donut-and-web-design shop could all through a few hours and making stuff better (theoretically). Google obviously has some 20% time (and probably some 80% time) going at the problem, and that’s a heck of a lot of TDH’s right there.

In the end, may the best platform win, but even if it turns out to be HTML5 10 years down the road, I suspect that Flash will simply because something different, and something better build on top of HTML5, throwing Adobe’s TDH’s on top of Google’s TDH’s for something all kinds of wonderful. (hey, engineers have dreams too!)

I have no reason to believe that open web/html5 can EVER stay ahead of Flash/Silverlight. I say this for a simple reason. I don’t see Adobe and Microsoft stop innovating there platforms. They are ahead of HTML5, they will stay ahead of HTML5 for next decade. Consider this:

According to WHATWG website HTML5 is still changing and will become final recommendation in year 2012. (towards the end of the world as we know it Seriously a “final recommendation” in 2012? By then Microsoft is already out with IE9 and if HTML5 is still changing IE and other browsers won’t render things alike. It will still remain a mess. Chances are that MS will not incorporate an incomplete standard the way they ditched CSS3. So much for the cross browser HTML standard.

If you’re making cutting edge stuff today, you can do it now with combination of AJAX/Flash/Silverlight. What HTML5 brings in is nothing to be excited about. You will still be able to do the same thing with HTML5.

And all browsers of 2012 will still have to render todays page like they render it today.

I wrote a post on similar lines last month.