Flash and the Web

announcing the death of flash is not something that will go unnoticed, so when blogging about how the lack of flash support on the iphone might make the failures of flash as a web technology more visible and lead to the demise of flash on the web, the comments were mostly in favor of flash. here is a broad classification of how people responded:

• how do you play video or audio without flash? - that is a very valid point, and points out that the web so far has failed to settle down on a standard format for audio and video. this is a clear failure of the web as of today. but seeing flash as a media player is not my point, and as long as it is only used this way, i have no issues with it. the problems start when flash is being used as an application platform, where whole web sites (which in reality are flash sites which happen to use the web as a transport protocol) are hidden in flash and not accessible through standards means of web interactions, such as making bookmarks or being amenable to graceful degradation.
• flash is the next wave of hypermedia interaction, and it is not as brittle as using web 2.0 technologies depending on javascript and browser features - flash is nice for developers because it gives them the closed world assumption that everybody out there is having the latest flash version installed. the web is messy because people have all kinds of devices and software, and developing for this landscape is certainly less convenient. the programming-heavy ways of many web 2.0 apps are less than ideal, but my hope is that they are a phase of transitioning into a less programming-oriented web 2.0 world which might be called declarative web 2.0. the important point is: the web is about heterogeneity and loosely coupled systems, flash is all about a homogeneous population where non-flash users are completely lost.
  
• DuDE. leArn 2 usE Caps. - this certainly is a valid comment. I AM WORKING ON THIS ONE.

i will very soon follow up with a more detailed post (and here is my first try) on how flash violates the architecture of the world wide web, and hopefully this will make my point more clear that flash simply is not a good web technology, even though it may be a good and useful multimedia application platform. this is a very important difference.

Comments

[varmac]

the problem is your over concern about web "technology" allow me to enlighten you...the visitor ONLY cares if the info is what they want, and fun and easy to get at ....the only people that about tech are the tech heads...I do not care what they use to make my favorite TV show as long as I can watch....no one really cares about Web Architecture except web architect's....

[Brian!]

Varmac, I was just about to comment on the same thing.

The fact is, non-tech users just want a cool experience. They could give a crap about what powers it. On the other side, if you go into any large corporation, the marketing teams all want the coolest way to show off their products and services.

The reason Flash is so prevelent is because it offers rich media animation to the masses in a rather painless download. The development applications, though not perfect, have been available for a long time and are very polished compared to other alternatives. Also, there is a large (and growing) Flash developer community.

More-so, ActionScript 3.0 follows standards so much better than Javascript does that Mozilla will be using it in their next browser for the Javascript 2.0 interpreter. This will allow Javascript coders to easily code Actionscript and vice versa easier/faster encouraging even more Flash apps.

Then you have technolgies like Silverlight. Why would Microsoft invest millions if the future of the web did not include rich media plugins into websites?

Honestly, I see the opposite happening. Over time I expect formats like Flash will begin to take over more and more as HTML/Javascript hacks take a back seat. And this is based on the fact that my wife and friends love the iPhone, and most of all, they love to fun GUI - not the tech or features behind it. They also love Flash stuff. They stick photo albums and videos in their MySpace page, they send me their mockup of a Simpsons character from the Simpsons movie page - all Flash, and they send me greeting cards - again Flash.

Flash is no longer just some banner ad toy, it is a development platform that is far more rich than any browser. And as for "standards", Flash actually looks the same on every platform it runs on. This cannot be said of HTML and browsers, even on the same OS.

[Robert Hirst]

The point you made on Graceful degradation is valid in todays climate. But you have to acknowledge that graceful degradation is not something that comes for free if you stick to the w3c standards for content. Partly because none of the browser vendors truly stick to the standards themselves. Disabling javascript shows how many websites are critically dependent on what is again should be an optional extra to some zing to pages.

If you build an application based around AJAX, then there is also an all-or-nothing risk, since if the browser (mobile or not) must have some kind of the XML request object, which not all do. There are many non-Flash sites which break on devices like the PSP because of this very reason.

The potential lack of graceful degradation in html pages is something which is currently addressed through software solutions. The Google Web Toolkit attempts to address the differences in browsers and make the differences between browsers not something that the developer needs to worry about. Perhaps in the future there will be a super-Google-Web-Toolkit which can take some common language, then compile for a multitude of RIA platforms like Silverlight, JavaFX and Flash (maybe even AJAX as output option, but this is less likely as it is highly deficient in many of the areas these platforms excel in, so would lack equivalent functions). There have already been converters which take a Flash application and turn it to Silverlight, and I'm sure the day will come when developers are sick of being pawns in the battle for control of the RIA space, so tools will become available which just say "I don't care if you prefer Microsoft, Adobe or Sun for your browser plugin, I'm going to rock your world". And maybe the w3c will come up with a 4th way which actually delivers a standard which can do the things people are coming to expect from the web.

btw, Bookmarks not working in Flash/Flex is a coding issue, and one which affects AJAX just as much as Flash. There are ways around it for both too.