Eric Meyer: Will HTML5 Kill Flash?

Eric Meyer's answer to the question from the audience "Will HTML5 and CSS3 kill Flash"? during his talk titled "The Future of the Web (Is Now). Eric appeared at Cuyahoga Community College as part of the Web Work / Web Wisdom series presented by the college's Visual Communication & Design department. Recorded January 26, 2010.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• HTML
• HTML5
• CSS
• CSS3
• Eric
• Meyer
• web
• design
• development
• Flash
• Cuyahoga
• Community
• College
• Web
• Work
• Wisdom
• Cleveland

[awdsgn]

@decapattack Not sure that you need to convince your customers to re-do anything. It's more about what do you do now and into the future. With Microsoft abandoning Silverlight in favor of HTML5 you can see a shift coming.

I don't think Flash is going away, but I'll bet that it will become more of a niche market product, with much of its current use shifting to HTML5.

[zcan]

Making things move around? It's called animation. Sorry, even ten years ago Flash animation tools were really good. Unfortunately everyone was animating at 12 frames per second. Tweening at that frame rate will make just about anything look bad.

[awdsgn]

@zcan I suspect that basic timeline animation, where Flash got its start, is not its future. Scripted interactivity is more important. HTML5 has a long way to go. I don't think Flash will disappear but will be used differently.

[awdsgn]

the answer is no, maybe, at least for now. but you'll find folks who disagree.

[awdsgn]

No question that we'll have to see where this road leads. Eric made the point that in terms of animation, etc., HTML/CSS is where Flash was 10 years ago. Maybe basic animation will be taken over by coding and Flash will handle the heavy-duty interactivity. As pointed out by KnightChatX, Flash continues to evolve as well.

[gigalin]

@awdsgn microsoft never ever sit tight and develop anything serious. So, there is no shift coming in future. Steve Job has only two things in mind, consumers : Apple fanatic fans who believe in every words of Steve and Comptetitor like MS,who is the rival. Flash has already rooted more than decade which I believe that no any other plug-in maker did the same as flash.

[decapattack]

My question is: how your going to say to your customers to to the same thing, again, but with html5?

How you can convince me that i have to pay you to do the same job again and im obliged to pay you? For what? To take something that works with flash and will work exactly the same with HTML5?

[BannyBunch]

flash works on my cellphone (full web browsing experience) beat that...

[KnightChatX]

@theoriginalKland Well with Flash I can pretty much implement any native programming language I want to use in terms of web or internet application client/server programming, Javascript and HTML work with Flash, and you can easily program web applications and services in programming language of your choice like VB.NET make a simple webserver, program your services, then access that from Flash serving as the UI to display or dynamically manipulate the results.

[KnightChatX]

@Arc19WebDesign If anything is oldschool it's definately HTML.

[KnightChatX]

View the response cache from Hulu.

This is the response cache listed in Hulu, you can also see the information on their updated video player using Flash's Action Script 3 that is updated to give new features for the overall user experience and to support the video's for the Movie and TV Show industries.

[KnightChatX]

Google Search Topic: Hulu isn't ready for HTML5 yet.

This article might shed some light on the current issue with HTML5 and why one of the leading movie and TV Show watching sites online isn't fully adapting it now.

This is also similiar to Googles' adaption of Youtube as part of their services over the earlier VLC plugin option.

[Goobicon4507]

People talk performance and capability, but don't forget, in addition to ALL these things and more, Flash has a HUGE 90% + user base, huge developer base (which I believe to be a big determining factor), and they forget that Apple, the people who have really sort of instigated this debate in the first place, really don't have that big of a market penetration. Flash is too well-developed and Adobe too big a company to see it just disappear.