[OT] Can Of Worms (was Re: Running revlets on the iPad)

[Scott Rossi]

> HTML5 + JS + CSS3 is the future... it will superseed Flash, eventually.

I find it interesting that many folks here decry the use of Flash, but would
be quite happy to have the rev plugin gain more widespread use.

I would hazard a guess that if Adobe was a small company just starting out
and came up with the idea for Flash, most people would be quite thrilled.
But Adobe is giant conglomerate and the general policy for any large company
is "No mercy!"

It's not a valid argument to simply say "Flash sucks."  The core ideas
behind Flash make sense: replace bandwidth-heavy bitmaps with efficient
vector art that gets rendered with bitmap effects when displayed; store the
instructions for animation, rather than individual animated frames; use
efficiently compressed audio that gets decompressed on the client side.

Obviously, one can argue the implementation could use more work.  And I will
the first the claim that Adobe so complicated ActionScript that it is
virtually inapproachable by novice developers (if you don't believe this,
explain why Adobe developed Catalyst).

But I'm having a hard time understanding why employing 3 separate
technologies -- HTML5 + JS + CSS -- is considered an improvement over using
one.  Because they're "open"?  Does this mean they're automatically better
technologies?

As someone who's spent years in Web development and who has spent countless
hours finding workarounds for Web browser idiosyncrasies and screw ups, I am
quite leery of this move toward "everything in the browser".  How many man
hours have been wasted by developers trying to get their Web pages to work
cross-browser, not to mention cross-platform?  Billions?  Trillions?  And
now, because Flash is suddenly considered "bad", using a collection of
separate Web technologies must automatically be "good".

"But all the modern browsers will support standards and will render
HTML+JS+CSS indentically!!"  Seriously?  Then what will be the benefit of
using one browser over another?  Why even have multiple browsers?

The truth is browsers will NEVER do things similarly if they're competing
with one another.  Which means the development headaches are are only going
to continue.  Say what you want about Flash, but it's *one environment*, not
IE/Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Opera/etc.

We're 10 years into the new millennium, and things are getting more
complicated, when they should be getting simpler.

And we still don't have flying cars.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design