Can Flash Survive HTML5? | Hacker News Reader

Can Flash Survive HTML5?

linux-mag.com

7 pointslinuxmag8 comments

Some people think that Flash will die in face of HTML5 if they repeat it many times. The reality though is that Flash has many features over HTML5, is much faster than most implementations and unlike HTML5 which isn't even fully supported by all browsers available, Flash is right here right now and works with all major browsers released the past decade.

As i said many times at similar threads, i don't like Flash and sometimes i wish Sun didn't killed Java off the web with its UX ignorance (Java is much faster and capable than Flash but even today the experience is awful). But there isn't a better tool for the job and if someone wants to provide a Flash alternative, this alternative must provide everything that Flash provides including the Flash designer AND good /practical/ reasons for existing Flash users to move and learn whatever new platform.

A 1.8 GHz machine should be able to play a low-resolution video without stuttering or lagging. Yet every time I visit Youtube on my admittedly rather old computer, it slows to a damn crawl. You know what could play similar resolution videos at full speed with no problems? My goddamn 486/66. Flash needs to go.

Are you sure your 486/66 can play streamed H.264 videos?

Besides, Flash isn't only about video. Although currently is the only working cross-browser method to show video.

Regarding Flash designer and lack of tools, I think this might be a distraction. In the old days designers used to build websites in things like Dreamweaver. And now they click together websites out of open source code (either low level stuff like Wordpress or higher-level interface stuff like JQuery) and add a layer of design on top.

I think the amount of distributed effort that is moved out of throwaway one-off designs and redirected to using and improving shared components has had a noticeable impact on the web. I think the same will be true of JQuery, CSS3, SVG, Canvas, HTML5 video and all the other things that are alternatives to various parts of Flash.

Maybe I'm not visiting the right websites, but I rarely see anything clever or unique done in Flash. What I do see would generally be much better if people were taking off the shelf components and inserting their own images, minimal code and music files etc. to create something that is unique to their site but also built from commodities so that there's a chance it might degrade gracefully, support accessibility, be tweaked for maximum performance and all the other benefits of being a widely used tool.

In fact many of the better uses of Flash already use this model (e.g. the standard Flash video players are better than 99% of the hand rolled ones that are unique to a single site) but it seems culturally alien to the Flash community.

The thing is, Flash isn't just for making sites. It isn't just for playing videos. Is a multimedia platform which can be used, among others, to make sites (although its not a good idea imho but some people like it), media players, front ends, games (a very big market), web applications (like those image painters or sound editors), widgets (for stuff like graphs), chat rooms and others.

The implementation is compact (just 4MB) and the files it uses (SWF) are also very small and network friendly (support streaming to almost all levels). The player might not be the best piece of engineering, but it works and as i said there isn't any alternative that enables people do all that Flash can do.

"Cobol is right here right now and works with all major mainframes released the past decade."

Elaborate because for a moment i thought you were comparing Cobol with Flash :-)

I really hope not... I'd really love to see html5 and javascript replace it. Especially because once html5 offers the basic functionality, javascript flash emulators like gordon (http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon) will be able to fill the gap while designers are still holding out

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