Why I don't want Flash to die (and you shouldn't either)
waxpraxis.org
waxpraxis.org
* It breaks web standards like persistent URLs and the back button (granted, there are some workarounds) and eschews native UI elements.
* It is inaccessible to visually impaired users.
* It is built on closed, proprietary technology, which raises both principled and pragmatic concerns (one pragmatic concern is the poor security framework, which might be ameliorated by more eyeballs on the source code).
* It tends to emphasize superfluous visuals over meaningful content (this isn't a requirement of Flash but it's a common result arising from Flash's dominant motifs).
And finally, a posterior observation:
* An awful lot of Flash applications just suck.
One of the comments on there said, "but check out thewfa! You can't make THOSE websites in html5!"
And my immediate, lizard brain response was: "Why would I want to? I bet their bounce rates are through the roof, and their return traffic approaches nil."
And because you wouldn't want to, nobody should?
There's a reason why Flash, and Flash websites, exist. Think about it pretty hard. You'll eventually figure it out.
And no, their bounce rates are not through the roof. I've monitored plenty of Flash websites, including FWA ones. Unless 3% is "through the roof" (and this is for a website we've published just a couple of weeks ago, running on the latest Flash Player version), you've just lost your bet.
* Adobe have a whole section on how to make your application accessible http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/
* Flash the format is an open standard, In June 2009, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project, which made the SWF specification available without restrictions. What is closed is their player. That said they have released open source actionscript libraries.
* As for emphasizing visuals, that is due to the designer driving the project. Flash and Flex offer a rich programming environment so it's really up to each project to choose what they want.
* Yes there are sucky flash apps, but there are also sucky webpages. There is sucky everything. There are also good flash apps and good websites.
HTML5 + JS + ARIA works better now than Flash ever has.
It's fine to make Flash games that don't work with screenreaders. But not websites.
And it's not fine to claim that something is accessible just because the vendor says it is.
* You can't easily save an object for personal use, such as a photo or video.
* No mute button, it's up to the content creator to do that. Is anything on the web more annoying?
* Overuse. Purely a matter of taste, but every time I see a flash site animating content than really should be static I flash back to the days of <blink> and <marquee>. As a web developer I've encountered clients who consider flash the apex of website technology. They don't care how the site works or how it responds as long as it's "on flash".
My understanding is it has features for people with handicaps. Granted, what accessibility features do recent HTML5 games offer to someone visually impaired? Probably nothing.
Closed, proprietary technology; something neither Windows or Mac users can really complain about. =)
As for superfluous visuals, that's debatable. Blame the designer, not the tool.
As for Flash applications sucking: Trust me, there are probably more sucky HTML/JS/CSS websites out there. =)
No more or less than AJAX-driven apps and the "work-around" is the same: anchors.
The HTML 5 technology stack is not well positioned to do everything Flash can do though - and I pointed out three key places where that's absolutely the case.
The biggest point though is that HTML creeps slowly forward through a standards process that is laborious at best. Flash, being a de-facto standard controlled by one company doesn't have to wait - it can push and prod forward and let developers explore new ideas and create new experiences. Even if you don't care for Flash, you should appreciate what it does for pushing the web forward. Sure there are missteps - I think Flash ads are awful too, but the work and because of that HTML5 and canvas will be used to build just as annoying ads in the future.
the standards committee dont "design" the internet, by definition to become a specification someone needs to have implemented it, browser vendors are free to implement cool new features as fast as they want, w3c is just a forum for agreement on those new features.
if we were waiting on rubber stamping from the w3c, we wouldnt even be using ajax right now.
Six years.
During the same time Flash went from a no scripting (well it was essentially programming via madlibs with Flash 4) to ActionScript 3 (Flex 2, the first place AS3 was used, was in early beta at the time I believe).
New versions of the Flash Player only take a few months to hit 90%+ penetration rates.
as web developers we need to be pushing canvas and font-face and webgl etc and stop running back to propietary plugins every time a font kinda looks not exactly the same on every other machine as mine.
Its pretty unarguable that open standards are fundamentally better than proprietary formats, a single company owning the format the web runs on would be disastrous, instead of opening this gap to push flash into, I think energy is better spent pressuring those involved to help push web standards to a point where flash is not needed, if every website didnt support ie6 tomorrow, next week ie6 would not exist, obviously that is a contrived situation but the fact is its us web developers that need to make sacrifices to make things work better on the users behalf, they cant and shouldnt be expected to do it themselves.
You can push HTML 5 and canvas all you'd like - but from a pure business standpoint if I can reach 98% of my audience with Flash, but only 40% with HTML5/Canvas I'd be an idiot to not choose Flash.
It will be WONDERFUL when I can use canvas to draw realtime graphs and know it will reach 98% of my users. That day is not today and it won't be for some time to come. Now, that being said I and doing exactly that task with canvas for a project - but it's as a backup of the Flash version since the client expects a sizable iPad/iPhone audience.
your "from a pure business standpoint" is exactly what I was referring to, people are far too quickly jumping to quick and ugly fixes like flash that do nothing to help fix the core problems of why web standards are limiting. It takes a lot of "idiots" to push canvas and friends into widespread adoption, I am glad to see people like github taking the initiative.
If you know your audience and can push the technology, by all means go for it! GitHub has exactly that audience. They aren't idiots for going with canvas - for them it's a savvy move. But the Flash option is still there for a reason too.
Often known as Hackromedia, they were not the powerhouse dev. studio it sounds like you're trying to push.
I prefer the present situation, where the experimental envelope-pushing happens in the controlled sandbox of Flash, and only the most vital innovations will eventually trickle down into the HTML standard.
There is a slight possibility that a startup could take on Adobe, but the fact is there are hundreds of books on Adobe CS4/CS3 because they own the industry mindshare.
Wanting Adobe to create tools that output to HTML5 is like asking Porsche to put their engines in bicycles; it doesn't make any sense. Even if you include all the tentative, beta, untested, -webkit-*, or otherwise suggested features for the spec, HTML5 isn't even close to Flash in terms of complete features.
She's tried other free tools, and always ends up finding things that simply can't be done. And then there is the packaging, all together. Everything works together.
And I can appreciate that. A single suite of applications makes it easier to learn, makes it easier to manage, and makes it easier to train others.
To put that in perspective, right now, somewhere around 60%
of the browsers in the hands of users aren’t capable of
rendering the canvas tag.
Fully open isn't the answer for everything. Flash is the most widely distributed piece of software ever - it got that way by NOT being forked and offering what HTML didn't both in terms of consistency and features.
As a side note, I think there is also a subtle common UI pattern to abuse the hover feature on websites which is common in flash. It makes touch-based browsing more difficult and I wish web developers would avoid it. It isn't fair to blame flash for it though, javascript can do it too.
Adobe and Macromedia were a startup once, just like many companies by HN members.
I want Adobe and its technologies to improve, not die.
In this particular case - the web was ugly before Flash and it'll be just as ugly after it. And as waxpraxi writes, some good did come out of it (force me and i'll make a list : )
Flash is not a gun, it does not kill, and i don't wish it to die.
browsers can now natively play video, play audio, find your location, store offline data, and do direct socket operations. i can't imagine a webcam api being too far off, enabling a flash-free chatroulette (that's all we really care about anyway, amirite?)
Do you think Flash will stand still in that time? Suddenly jump from 98% to 0%?
i say this as a user with three major devices (computer, phone, and tablet) that have no flash support, and am happy to see the proliferation of more open technologies and the doing away with of proprietary, insecure, buggy crutches like flash.
Don't understand me wrong, i actually wish Flash to die. But i'd rather like it dead when programming for different browsers becomes less of a pain. Internet standards need to evolve faster (how long did it take for HTML5?) and browsers need to be more standard compliant/support a common feature set. Also, as a sidenote, i wouldn't write websites in Flash, but i can see some actual benefits for the developer.
This IDE could start off as a clone of earlier flash versions where you just manipulate shapes over time(http://dev.w3.org/html5/canvas-api/canvas-2d-api.html#images) and of course you could do more useful stuff using common html elements and incorporating audio/video. Once more features are added to the html spec, the application's functionality could grow.
I thought about attempting to start this up as a web-based app, but I have to familiarize myself a bit more with canvas, canvas shapes, and animation.
Imagine if you made cars and you didn't conform to the safety standard? Obviously that wouldn't work and you'd be shut down. However, a lot of web standards zealots seem to imply that meeting the standard is a great goal to achieve. There needs to be a bunch more innovation in all browsers, even just as tech demos or features for the vendor's home page so that other browsers can adopt the ideas.
Basically I think the author is spot on, but I wish it didn't have to be done through Flash.
I mean: Wouldn't that be great?
And considering... * The plans for the standard to be completed will still take around 10 years * Flash can move at a much faster pace in development * Flash penetration gets to 90% in less than one year * Browser penetration moves very slowly - 8 years after release, MSIE 6 is still at 22%
...do you really think things will improve that much in 5 years?
I can't wait for 5 years to pass by. When Flash (and Silverlight) are even more improved, when they're still evolving, when Flash is widely used in mobile devices (other than the ones built by one rotten Apple), when HTML5 is still a mess for development, when cross-browser HTML support is still wild west, and when HTML5 is still unrealistic for Real-World development due to lack of penetration... that's when reality will start hitting people in the face.
But hey, maybe another 5 years later? Who knows.
Also, Flash Player since version 9 has supported h.264, a codec that is supposed to be a condender for rendering Flash useless.
But video is what makes Flash considered 'necessary' for most consumers. The two are almost synonymous so if Google goes through with it, it will be the beginning of the end for Flash.
Back then, it was animation / interaction. Flash took advantage of a lack of standards across browsers as people were afraid to use javascript extensively. That time has passed.
Right now, Flash lives because of video. The animation necessity has mostly been replaced.
Assuming Google releases VP8, then your only argument left is that either:
1) Flash does video better (by a little)
2) Flash will find the next big thing to keep it alive.
I do not find (1) a compelling argument to use Flash for video on most sites. In fact, the irony is that Flash may be kept alive for backwards browser compatibility.
Until I know what (2) is - concrete examples please - I'm not willing to put any confidence just b/c Flash prevailed in the past. It is too small a sample size to put so much confidence in.
*formatting
You mean a better open source video codec than Theora? They did and they have.
What would submitting to a standards body give them? If they are to continue moving Flash forward with new versions every 18-20mo they can't wait for a standards body.
Then don’t install flash!
That is the degree of freedom that I appreciate. Not so much Flash that bank/shop/gov. sites expect anyone to have it.
And not so little that all the, er, uninteresting-to-me stuff now in Flash is rendered in unavoidable HTML5 standards. (Note to self: save a copy of an ancient browser.)
Firefox without Flash does OK for me now, for the rest of the stuff that needs javascript and images. I doubt it will be possible to tune it properly (short of hosts file munging) if all Flash migrates to HTML5.
And of course it's a bit unwieldy to keep multiple browsers around - Konqueror 3.x also shows me a convenient 'open link in Firefox' option, but that's it. And I don't think this kind of fiddly options will be exactly first priority.
We'll see in a couple of years, I guess.
P.S.
The 'canvas' animation in the page linked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1252899 pegs one core of my Linux machine with Firefox 3.5.
I just tested, and it does the same with image loading turned off. Must also turn off javascript to make it stop (duh, must be a js busy-wait doing it).
(I seem to recall a line about 'depending on the kindness of strangers', not really an enviable situation.)
Now HTML5 is going to have to deal with the problem and they we'll have to wait until browsers make their own implementation of a solution that will probably be similar to Adobe's eventual solution.