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Actionscript 3.0 is much more sophisticated than Javascript/HTML5. The capabilities of HTML5 are equivalent to Actionscript1.0/Flash Player 6, circa 2004 (these demos were entirely possible even in Flash Player 5 perhaps). Plus, Flash is reasonably cross-platform (except for iPhone/iPad of course). On another note, making embeddable widgets (slideshows, videos with more than just viewing functionality, like Youtube) is very hard in Javascript, since any complex embedded Javascript would likely clash with other scripts on the page (we have experienced this, making a complex Javascript widget, that ended up clashing with Adsense ads of our customers, it was a nightmare to debug that).

Incidentally, I brought up my task manager while viewing these demos, the CPU utilization jumped from 5% to 97% (Core 2 Duo, 1.66 GHz).

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Wait for an year or two. IMHO, HTML5 is going to evolve much faster than ActionScript. When I saw these kind of cool animations in Flash years ago, I wanted to play around with it but couldn't see the source. It was all hidden behind the swf/fla files making it harder to see how things were done. If I wanted to fiddle with it I needed Flash software. Not so with HTML5. All you need is a text editor and a browser. I am sure whoever this link would have tried to look at the source.

> making embeddable widgets is very hard in Javascript, since any complex embedded Javascript would likely clash with other scripts on the page

You can use local variables the way jQuery uses it. Something like (function($))(jQuery). If you declare all your variables and functions within this scope its easy to avoid clashes with other scripts.

>When I saw these kind of cool animations in Flash years ago, I wanted to play around with it but couldn't see the source.

While technically all JS is open-source / source-visible, just wait: where there's a market, there will be more and more sophisticated obfuscation techniques. Especially for a language like JS, where it can easily generate and modify its own code.

The reverse is also true. For every obfuscation tool there will be an unobfuscation tool. They may not give back 100% of the original source but they can go close.

There are SWF decompilers too.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=swf+decompiler

If HTML5 authoring tools start appearing we'll have to make sure they use open formats and runtimes.

While I do not care for obfuscation for its IP protection function, having the source visible and accessible is a problem for games: how can we know that top scores are valid and a variable has not been modified? Basically, all JS games are cheatable. John Resig talked about this http://bit.ly/bO3bcf

"HTML5 is going to evolve much faster than ActionScript."

As written, this statement is wrong.

Adroit developers are picking up HTML5's JS API's with more enthusiasm than they have ActionScript, and they'll push those API's to their limits, as they have done with the DOM API's. But the technology itself--the underlying standards--must necessarily evolve at a slower pace than a proprietary language like ActionScript. Browser vendors haven't quite caught up with HTML5's growth yet; once the the spec's final, W3C won't be moving the goalpost out any further for a long time.

> once the the spec's final, W3C won't be moving the goalpost out any further for a long time.

You're wrong, html5 is supposed to be the last final big version, it is agreed that html5 will continue to be incremently improved from now on (it was posted recently on HN).

Oi! I didn't say HTML5 is "the last final big version" of HTML, I said we won't see it expanded for a long time. Maybe I'll be proven wrong about that, but it still takes demonstrably longer for the W3C to reach an agreement about new specs than it does for Adobe to release updates to Flash. Flash Player 5 was the most recent version when XHTML 1.0 came out!

That said, I would like to read that article/thread. Do you have a link, or remember its title? I can't seem to hit upon the right combination of Google keywords. ;) Thanks.

Why wait? Everything in these demos was possible with IE5 and its VML implementation. Canvas has been in FireFox from the start.

You don't need HTML5 to do vector graphics in a browser.

Canvas is a relatively new thing, originally built by Apple before they standardised it. Maybe you meant SVG? Even that was Firefox 1.5 though as far as I recall.

> Plus, Flash is reasonably cross-platform (except for iPhone/iPad of course)

Except that it sucks rocks on everything besides x86 and Windows. OS X? Linux? amd64? ARM? There's a reason it's not on iOS devices. Adobe has consistently failed to make a compelling offering for anything except 32-bit Windows.

(I know it runs on amd64 machines, but it's not 64-bit: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/6b3af6c9.html)

I'll take a truly portable Flash 5 equivalent over Flash 9 or 10 where everything outside Windows/x86 is a second class citizen.

CPU usage is still pretty high with this stuff, but there are plans to accelerate it and improve performance. What's the plan for Flash? Who knows because it's proprietary^ and there's a single entity that can fix things. And HTML5 performance isn't much worse than Flash on OS X or Linux. Windows is completely irrelevant to a lot of us.

^ Now someone's going to point to the spec and mumble something about Flash being an open standard. Show me a single open and viable alternative implementation, then we'll talk about it being open. Till then we're Adobe's pawns.

I think I know a thing or two about Flash.

http://mahmud.arablug.org/

It's a powerful platform, and I will accept the author's desire to avoid using his demos in "HTML5 vs Flash" punditry; but it's apparent where HTML5 is headed, and I can't help but notice its competence, in domains where flash is usually considered the only option.

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