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Comment by apphacker | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a sane sentiment, although I personally think flash still has a place. I don't imagine that five years from now we'll be looking at flash as a relic.

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People seem so focused on Flash in relation to games and video online, but they all fail to take into account the ability of Flash to access things like your webcam and microphone. So far as I know, these are not capabilities that are going to be part of HTML5.

I have more trust allowing Skype access my webcam and mic. How often are these capabilities of Flash used (besides chatroulette)?

Yes, how often are these capabilities used (besides one of the most phenomenal web applications in recent years, but these parentheses let me pretend that nobody cares about something like that)?

Gosh, who would've thought that I could install plugins when web applications needed access to bits I don't normally want them to have access to?

http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/

ustream, stickam, chatroulette to name of few. ustream and stickam have been around a lot longer than Chatroulette too. I remember Leo Laporte pimping ustream back in '05 or so on one of his podcasts. Services like UStream allowed him to host 'live' video/podcasts where the audience could watch live (or download later) and somewhat participate in the podcast. This is something that would be a lot harder to do with Skype, at least on the video end of things.

I'm not defending Flash here. I'm just annoyed when people declare Flash useless because HTML5 'replaces it,' while completely ignoring aspects of it that HTML5 doesn't replace.

<device>? I think we won't see this tag soon.

Not even that. Consider apps that are used for screen or desktop sharing, e.g. LogMeIn Express and such. It is basically a Flash version of VNC viewer. I don't think these can be done in HTML5.

Just yesterday there was a story on ./ about a HTML5 coded VNC client.

Just a quick google search:

http://www.w3.org/2009/05/DeviceAPICharter

I only found out about this a few weeks ago, from another hn link. It's coming :)

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