Two Cents, Too Late
It’s been a while now since the Flash vs. HTML5/CSS3 brouhaha really got going when Steve Jobs declared Flash dead, but the topic jumped into my head again this week when I used Flash for parts of a video project I’m working on.
Inverse kinetics was the feature that brought me back to Flash for this project. It’s a huge help with some types of animation, and features like that, along with it’s powerful ActionScript 3 language, are one reason Flash will be around for a while.
Now, Steve Jobs wasn’t entirely wrong, and anyone who paid attention to the industry knows that Flash had been taking a beating for years by web designers and developers – primarily because so many people use Flash in so many wrong ways. The classic Flash-only web sites, for example. Steve Jobs just brought new weight – not to mention a legion of followers – to the argument. And mobile certainly opens to door to a whole host of changes that are coming.
To be fair though, just about every complaint about Flash has been addressed in one way or another – either by Adobe, or by the huge community of Flash-related developers. I agree with the people that say avoid Flash on the web for many of the common uses we see – menus and navigation, for example. HTML/CSS/JavaScript is a far better choice for most of those features. Video playback is a tossup right now as far as I’m concerned. Yes, you can do it without Flash, but it harkens back to the old “Browser Wars” days when you had to specially code for each browser. A pain I certainly can do without. I’m sure that will get worked out eventually, but until it does Flash is just as valid as any other method – it’s easier for me to implement, and it works for all of my clients – the only exception being the iPhone/iPad audience, which is not too difficult to work around.
So, while I agree that Flash having a reduced role on the web is a good thing, I also think that Flash is far from dead. And if the past several years is any indication, I suspect that Adobe and the Flash community will push Flash into new areas before long.
Like any tool, the key is using Flash for what it’s best at.