As a person who started off web design using Macromedia Flash back in 1999 you may think that this blog post is going to be biased. To some degree you are probably right but when you look at the website landscape today it makes you wonder if we should have fought harder to keep Flash around. Did Apple’s stance of no flash do us a disservice? Did the cry for web standards set us back 10 years? The real problem was that some web browsers that existed were wonky at best so that web standards were developed so that these browsers would eventually come in line. Now that they are in line are we faced with another problem? Here are my thoughts on this:
Limited Imagination: It seems as though as you surf from one website to the next all you see is the same thing i.e. navigation to the top, big slideshow in the middle, news etc to the bottom. The next website you visit is merely a minor modification of the one you are currenlty on. Even this website is a facebook look-a-like (shame on me). The imagination that was around in 2003, 2004 has all but gone. A new website was like a new movie trailer. Gone are the days when you would stumble upon a website and think “WOW”. While some of the things that are now being done in HTML5 are indeed impressive, the same and better was being done over 10 years ago in 2002.
Too difficult: Flash had made being creative simple. Animation was a breeze and complex data manipulation and integration could have been achieved in mere lines of code. Accomplishing the same with HTML5 seems like rocket science in comparison to Actionscript (Flash’s Programming Language).
Penetration: At one point flash players existed on 98% of browsers and regardless of whether they conformed or not you had the same user experience. It took us ten years to be at this point with HTML5.
Having said all of this HTML5 is here to stay and everyone has moved on. Even the biggest of flash supporters have since gone on to learn new skills. I think though the web would have been much further along had Flash development continued at the rate that existed back in the early 2000’s.