| I suspect HTML5 won't displace flash, but standards in general eventually will. Not any time soon, mind you, but eventually. I've been trying to come up with a way to articulate how I think about this whole non-debate and here's a first stab: One of the primary reasons Flash will eventually be unseated is not that Flash is closed -- standards, to a certain extent, are constructed in a relatively closed manner -- but because standards and technologies built on top of standards are more agile. Flash is an awesome platform, but you can only build on that platform. Standards are great because you can combine platforms and build things not explicitly envisioned. Flash's single-platform approach makes it so that it will eventually have to play catch-up to a whole set of features that are being built by mixing and matching standards. CSS3 + Javascript, for instance, can be used without Canvas to build really awesome functionality. Canvas + Javascript can be used to make really engaging content. Flash will eventually have to compete not with another product on features, but an entire web of organic technologies that don't have to wait for other components to advance in order to release the next stable version. |
What will displace Flash is the lack of necessity for Flash, which is (or should be) obvious in 80% of what we see online. There are many things HTML do better, and easier, than Flash, and ignoring that is the real problem. People all of a sudden are trying to make HTML5 be like Flash, and failing at it, instead of remembering why Flash has never displaced HTML in the first place. I'm all of a sudden seeing a bunch of completely inane HTML5 websites that could have worked much better were they built with simple HTML technology, and it's infuriating to think we're back to the insanity of the Flash 5 time, where people would build stuff in Flash just because (something that today's Flash-based restaurant websites are an evolution of).
People need to remember that making snappy, simple, straight forward websites is totally a thing. That's what's gonna keep Flash at bay, in its little corner, as a technology best suited for lots of interactivity and media and embeds or whatever it is. Not trying to make all websites be Flash-like but just with an alternative but barely supported technology.