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

[Brian Yennie]

Amen, Scott.

There are plenty of awful uses of Flash, but the general wave of outrage (and associated love for HTML5) has reached levels of ridiculousness.

We'll be lucky if HTML5 reaches Flash-level performance and portability any time soon. And I'm sure advertisers will be more than happy to use it for the same blinking banners they used to make in Flash.

I find it especially funny that Flash gets singled out for mobile performance issues when there is no well-performing alternative!


>> 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.