The reason that the Flash authoring tools work in a sane manner is because there is a single, consistent runtime that they target.
There is a vast graveyard of tools that tried to wrap html and javascript so you could make reasonable GUI authoring tools. To my knowledge they were all plagued by consistency and performance problems, or placed severe limits on what you could author.
This is less of a way forward than it is a pipe dream, no matter how promising Canvas looks.
Yes the existing tools are pretty awful... but they're generally made by small companies that don't know how to build tools, building on the current implementations of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Has anyone given it a real shot, targeting the newest features of HTML5?
Adobe on the other hand has built industry standard tools over and over again (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc). They've proven that they can export their apps to other platforms (iPhone). What they're not so good at is building open browser runtimes...
Seriously? Did Adobe beat you guys up and take away your computer? Did they say "no no no mine?"
Where is the "not open" you guys claim? Flex SDK + Eclipse == free Flash development.
I swear HTML5 fanatics just make stuff up these days. You'll use Windows, Flickr, Google, and Hacker News - all privately owned systems. But god forbid Flash is bad because... why?
Lack of openness: a browser plugin that is less stable and slower on Mac and Linux that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.
Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly utilize cookies on non-IE browsers that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.
Lack of openness: a browser plugin that doesn't properly return HTTP status codes on OS X that noone else can fix except Adobe...and only if they choose to do so.
The SWF standards (and associated standards like RTMP) are available for free on the Adobe website. You are permitted to construct alternative implementations based on this specification. I think it meets the definition of an open standard.
Would HTML not be an open standard if the only browser we had was IE, and it was horribly buggy? No - the quality of the available implementations is irrelevant to a standards "openness".
You're assuming everyone posting replies and that the author of the post are all HTML5 fanatics. Have you considered that many of us might have worked heavily in Flash/Flex for years designing website and applications, and that possibly the uprising against Flash mentioned here involves Linux Flash plugins seg faulting with no error messages, crazy Flex binding memory usage, general CPU overload and a horrible debug log policy due to sandboxing? I'd be interested to hear why you think Flash is good. Incidentally, who's using Windows? :)
Sounds funny, but my only supporting fact is I wouldn't be here without Flash. I basically loath programming but I'm willing to do it because of Flash.
Sure there's CPU problems and there will always be more-optimized forms of code. But Flash has a timeline, which is something few here will understand or appreciate.
Plus it really is ubiquitous, unlike anything else. I'll take a small performance hit if it means I don't have to learn/write/test multiple languages and systems.
I'm not in this for the code. I'm in it for the UX.
HTML5 isn't exactly old, nor is it complete, that's why no one has given it a 'real shot'. But honestly, walking down that path seems like an enormous headache with little reward.
CMS systems already solve the problem of "how do I make and update a website", with an order of magnitude less hassle for the developer, and much less hassle for the user.
The implementations may differ, but the main use-cases are the same. So it's like comparing an apple to an orange when you want to choose a healthy supplement to your diet ;)
The anti-Flash crowd with their fantasy about how HTML5 >= Flash are missing one phenomenally tragic detail ...
We're going to have HTML5 for the next twenty years - and right now it's only a sometimes substitute for Flash. If you think HTML5 is going to meet your requirements for the next 20 or more years.. well, assuming you're pushing 30 like me we're actually going to be close to retirement age by the time HTML5 is fully replaced by it's successor.
Arguing Adobe should kill Flash for HTML5 is the same as arguing the W3 should kill HTML5 for HTML 2.0 - it's 15 years old, how's it stack up against your requirements today?
Technology has never stood still for the W3C and market penetration to catch up, and 'kill flash' is betting that this time it will ... silly.
"We're going to have HTML5 for the next twenty years..."
Everybody's going to get up to speed with implementation of HTML5 and then ... stop? The story of HTML5 so far has been a mix of browsers chasing/leading the standards. In other words, the standards and the browsers are evolving together rapidly. I don't see why that would stop anytime soon. Certainly all this innovation won't ground to a halt when HTML5 submits their final release to the W3C (or whatever the next "formal" step is at this point).
Will there be some instance of an installed browser today that will still be running on a machine somewhere in 20 years? Well, probably... but remember that guy a couple of years ago that still had a CP/M system running his business? He wasn't holding anybody back.
And once everybody's on modern, standards-compliant browsers (and thus there's less friction for upgrading, i.e. there's no more "all our corporate apps only run in IE6"), I expect far more people will upgrade far more often. The web is at a really, really exciting time if you ask me.
So: non-Flash web technologies can reliably handle some percentage of Flash use cases today. Certainly more than a couple of years ago, and that appears to be about to go up again a lot more as HTML5 sweeps across the web. The number of use cases that require Flash are going to continue to get smaller and smaller over time. When will Flash be utterly irrelevant to the average user? I don't know. But WAY less than 20 years from now.
The current standards are a decade old already, HTML5 has been 6 years in the making and will probably be another 4 or 5 years before it reaches a market penetration that makes it an generally-viable design decision rather than what it is now - a device or browser specific option.
Work probably won't even start on the HTML6 specification for another decade at least while they wrap up all the formalities for HTML5, and identify where it needs improvement, and slowly discuss and agree on those improvements. Years after that browsers will start supporting it feature by feature, and years after that enough users will have access to enough features to call it mainstream.
That process is very likely to leave us having this same discussion about whether HTML6 will kill Flash in 2030. Assuming anyone still makes or cares about any of this stuff that far in the future.
Where we are now with HTML5 the void between HTML5 and plugins (Flash is just the most significant) is smaller than it's ever been before, but the fallacy of that argument is that Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, Unity, etc are in active development and release cycles.
They make significant progress year after year, just like desktop software, operating systems, programming languages etc, and while HTML5 almost catches up right now this is as close as it's going to get at this time.
Keep in mind that they don't keep progressing linearly forever because of the nature of the service that's attempting to be provided -- neither are far off from being able to do basically all the things that can be done on a 2D panel attached to a speaker or two: interface device input, 2D/3D animation, sound effects/music, a bit of local persistence, access to the videocamera,... what else is there? I'm not sure of each's multitouch API, if any, but, really, there's not that much more beyond those things that HAS to be implemented for the vast majority of web pages and apps to fully function. Support for accelerometers and other such devices would be nice, but is hardly important to reading the New York Times or the other 99.999% of things people do/want to do with the web. Perhaps in 2030 there'll be argument about whether the web- or proprietary-way has the best support for holographic 3D displays or 360-channel surround sound, etc., but those and many other things that the two technologies don't support today seem likely to continue to overall be niche things. In other words, things whose proper role is a plug-in, not a vital part of many pages' experience. That's fine: there's going to be a role for plug-ins for a long, long time, perhaps forever. But, the fundamentals? We're getting pretty close to having them covered.
Also, I think it's well worth taking a good look at HTML5's rate of progress over the years. A huge chunk of the HTML5 effort has been toward just standardizing the response to the tag soup that is out there. That work is essentially done and doesn't have to be repeated. Just in the last year or two have things really taken off as far as adding new functionality to browsers and example pages, and it's only been in the last couple of months that a few actual commercial pages have started to use these things. In large part, that's because the web has been stuck for most of a decade because of IE stagnation. [Also note that the rest of the browser/platform vendors didn't seem to have a good mechanism to rapidly innovate together on until the HTML5 effort came together. I don't expect that that diplomatic work will have to be done again, either.] The web platform after the IE stagnation seems likely to move much faster toward covering the gaps that remain in the web platform.
So instead of adobe being the monopolistic developer of tools for the successful flash platform , adobe should compete with everybody else on developing tools to html5?
This doesn't seem like a great business move, at least not before they tried everything they can to keep flash important.
But isn't ActionScript completely open? And the flash framework is open too. You don't need Flash CS4 to use flash. You can also program it with a third party IDE and then use the free compiler. This would be quite comparable.
what parts of flash are not open? When flash opened those parts you mentioned? do their knowledge and control of the closed parts of flash enables them to build better tools? how big a lead did they have for their tools when they opened those parts of flash ? Are they still today the leader in flash tools so maybe it's not worthwhile for a competitor to enter?
I really don't know flash in depth , but my guess is that they today have a big advantage in flash tools and moving to html5 would seriously reduce their advantage.
The source code of the Adobe Flash plugin, if nothing else.
Incidentally, that does bring to mind one possible Hail Mary that could work: Open source the Flash player(s). Whether the open source community could fix performance issues on Linux and OSX depends on a lot of things, but they could certainly fix some things that would make it less aggravating.
(Since it's probably impossible to open source as-is due to licensing agreements it still might not work; depends on how much of the plugin is still left after you've removed those bits.)
Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.
(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)
If they open-sourced it, it would be difficult to standardize. With a major release every 12-18 months, it's already difficult to drive adoption (takes about 12 months to get > 90% user base per version).
I will agree - they might want to consider open sourcing the Linux version. I know nothing about Linux so I'm guessing it's related to trying to support the "anything-goes moving-target many-flavors-of Linux" issue.
mxmlc, the free compiler from adobe, does not allow you to use the standard gui controls that their paid compiler does. yes, you can use flex, but there is certainly some kind of reason that adobe added that limitation to mxmlc.
man, why do you people have to turn everything into a pissing match?
Precisely. Adobe has two very important footholds on the web: Flash and Acrobat. The web authoring tool landscape is only aimed at developers, a relatively minuscule market. Why would they eat their own tail?
It’s funny to me how a few years ago we were all slamming Apple for not allowing native iPhone apps and forcing us to build web apps, and now we’re slamming them for forcing us to build native apps instead* of web apps! Oh how quickly we forget…*
I think those of us who are slamming Apple over the iPhone development model are doing so because Apple is forcing us to do things. I'd be happy if they kept everything exactly the same, but allowed users to install any application from third-party websites.
I think some people are forgetting that Flash is used for more than just serving up video and pop-under ads (though admittedly that would be its largest use).
There are a lot of games that may not be possible to run on an HTML 5 canvas.
Also, lost in this discussion is the fact that one of the more popular browsers doesn't support HTML 5 in its current version or possibly even its next.
Does streaming video work under HTML 5 specs? If not, that's another thing that Flash can do, which you can't with html5.
Also, lost in this discussion is the fact that one of the more popular browsers doesn't support HTML 5 in its current version or possibly even its next.
Not within ogg/theora it doesn't because there's no way of signaling the correct amount of data to buffer as used in the buffering mechanisms of modern video codecs.
a) Excanvas is slow. I've used it in some projects. Its not too bad, but performance was an issue for me
b) There are other parts of HTML5 that IE doesn't support. Although I guess someone will eventually create similar shims to make <video> work as well as webworkers and database access.
The best way for Adobe to save it is to open source the plugin though I suspect the resulting fragmentation would be a hindrance as well. A certification process of some kind might be helpful in that regard though.
I'm sure there are patent and licensing issues getting in the way of such a move.
If Adobe ever did stop developing / supporting the Flash plugin, it would be a complete disaster from the point of view of people like myself who think once something has a URL it should ideally stay accessible until the heat death of the universe.
There is a vast graveyard of tools that tried to wrap html and javascript so you could make reasonable GUI authoring tools. To my knowledge they were all plagued by consistency and performance problems, or placed severe limits on what you could author.
This is less of a way forward than it is a pipe dream, no matter how promising Canvas looks.