[tomlin]

Adobe sits and thinks about what the next steps are for Flash and web standards organizations sit and think about how to replicate what Flash does – understand the demand cycle.

My point isn't that HTML5 sucks, it's that people see it as better than Flash – but it isn't, sadly. That isn't an evangelistic statement, it is a factual one. To push forward, we can't be ignorant. We (as a community) have to look at what Flash does and take it for HTML5 and then come back to the table at least as often as Adobe. Otherwise, Flash will always be better.

[fr0ggerz]

The point is both Adobe and the W3C are guessing. Think how much faster we could advance if it was put in the hands of the community. A community that constantly implements, gets feedback, re-implements, collaborates. You only have to look at three.js (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/) and similar to get an idea of what can be built on a low-level API.

[Edit: guessing, not second-guessing]

[BrendanEich]

Having participated in web browser standards for 15 years, in good (competitive) markets and bad, I agree completely, without reservation even though perfection is not an option.

The developer community, especially with open source as practiced on github.com, is much better able to path-find better high-level models and APIs. Committees and individual browser vendors are less likely to find the right designs and get them codified as well or as quickly.

This is not inevitable. You could have a righteous hacker/designer at a browser company, whose API and implementation are so winning they sweep all before them. Great if this happens, but it's rare in my experience.

Thus the apparent paradox of low-level APIs and increasingly very fast JS engines enabling faster and better hacker-community-based de-facto standardization than even the modern browser vendors can achieve on average. Then the standards bodies ideally roll up de-jure standards based on uncontested winning designs.

We're in the midst of this, so it's hard to see it in full. It's also slower than some people want, but Flash was not built in a day, or a year, either.

Browser vendor "defection" (failure to cooperate in standards bodies on consensus standardization) is an ongoing threat. Competition as browsers merge with mobile and desktop/tablet OS front-sides (home screens) and app platforms is of course still required to keep standards bodies functional.