Comments on: Flash isn’t evil, but …

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:20:26 +0000

I know my comment comes a little late, but HTML5 and Flash both have a welcomed home on the internet. HTML and Flash are both evolving over the years, and this isn’t going to stop. I don’t understand how people think it’s going to be one thing or the other. Two ways of doing the same thing can co-exist so there is no reason to take a fanboy status. We have PC’s and Mac’s, Xbox’s and Playstation’s, IE Firefox and Google Chrome, etc. I’m all for new technology, but I am tired of hearing the “This is what’s going to kill *insert name here*” crap.

By: frank

frank — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:04:01 +0000

just in: “Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source [...] [and will] officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month [...] [at which time] Mozilla and Google Chrome are expected to also announce support for HTML5 video playback using the new open codec.”

cfr. http://newteevee.com/2010/04/12/google-to-open-source-vp8-for-html5-video/

By: HTML 5 – Start of something new? « HTML5 Development

HTML 5 – Start of something new? « HTML5 Development — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:20:29 +0000

[...] I’m reading a lot of the “The Future of Web Conent”, “HTML vs Flash”, “Flash isn’t evil” and “The Future of Flash” here and here. What is going on!? Stop yelling, whining and [...]

By: Matthias Hoys

Matthias Hoys — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:20:08 +0000

YouTube released a HTML 5 video player as an alternative for Flash-based players:
http://www.youtube.com/html5

Matthias

By: frank

frank — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:09:19 +0000

and vimeo joined the html5-party as well, providing a nice fall-back to flash for the unfortunate (amongst whom are firefox-users, damn you pantent-issues!)

By: frank

frank — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:26:38 +0000

@peter; agreed, but in my opinion those short term trends are pointing in a certain direction

@john: “efficiency in terms of workflows and deployment/support costs” is an interesting sub-topic, but kind of vague for me, feel free to elaborate

in other news; google just launched the a html5-version of youtube in beta.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:49:45 +0000

Hi, is this the core of your statement?
“…some of the cutting-edge features that once were only available in Flash, can now be created more efficiently using non-propriety technology”

If so, I’d agree that the various clientside runtimes from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple are continuing to increase in common functionality, and there’s no reason to see this decade-old trend change. It’s natural for them to continue to accrete existing popular features.

I’d urge you to reconsider that “more efficiently” angle, however, particularly in light of practical workflows and deployment/support costs. Engineering a feature is just one step on the path to making it practical…!

jd/adobe

By: Peter Elst

Peter Elst — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:47:11 +0000

“But I’ll bet you that place in the future will be less prominent than the one it holds today.”

It will probably be different, technologies evolve — literally nobody would’ve guessed the significance video would have on the whole web landscape when that first came out with Flash.

Video support wasn’t even something on the roadmap for Flash but something one of the Macromedia engineers coded during a sabbatical.

Nobody would’ve thought how important that little hacky XMLHttpRequest thing would become and the role it played in AJAX and the evolution of a lot of web applications.

I think its fundamentally flawed to try and predict the future importance and relevance of a technology based on its past or current focus.

Technology is a constantly moving target and the best we can do is infer by current short term trends, even then there are no certainties.

The future is not ours to predict, its ours to create.