Submitted by “Even though its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by Web standards fans, Adobe has been building tools that embrace HTML5. The company recently released its own HTML5 video player, and Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 now contain a number of new HTML5 export tools. Now it seems Flash might be joining the party. At Adobe’s MAX conference this week, Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier showed of a demo of tool that converts Flash animations to HTML5 (well, technically it looks like a combination of HTML5, CSS and images).”
It’s a tag-soup vending machine! Put your Flash currency in, and out comes tasty tag-soup!
But honestly, why? Don’t Adobe have any confidence in their own technology? What message does this send to Flash aficionados? Why, on one front be pushing HTML/CSS to replace Flash, and why on another front by pushing Flash on mobile? They are losing the plot here.
I don’t see anything schizophrenic about what they’re doing – Flash is what is going to be in store for the short term but in the long term HTML5 will replace Flash for pretty much everything that it is used for today thus leaving AIR left for their multiplatform application strategy. It is no different to Microsoft who are pushing HTML5 but at the same time leaving Silverlight to be that framework so quick and dirty solutions can be created for enterprise.
Audio/video/usb/printer control/access and numerous other things that Siverlight and AIR have I just simply don’t see HTML5 ever acquiring nor do I think it is wise to bloat up something beyond what is absolutely necessary. We already have idiots here who make websites and complain when their pathetically crap code doesn’t work with Internet Explorer whilst they ignore the fact that the issue is with their code rather than Internet Explorer. Making the specification even more complex will mean these halfwitts will make even more unreadable and useless websites thus requiring even more ‘tolerance’ by rendering engines. Keep the specifications simple and get the damn developers up to speed.
As for the Flash converter, as long as the code it outputs can be used on a multitude of browsers then I don’t care about tag soup – all I care is about the end result. The issue of maintainability etc. is a matter for the website developer and the parent company to concern itself with.
What else did everyone expect? Adobe’s money is in the tools, not the player plugin. If they can sell the Flash authoring tools to an even broader audience by exporting HTML5, then that’s obviously what they will do.
Absolutely! I guess this conversion tool (if perfected that is) might actually save Flash from extinction. Even though it requires skills to create complex animations in Flash, it’s still much more easy to do it in Flash (and being able to deploy to iPhone/iPad/etc.) rather than directly code in HTML5.
It’s just a matter of time before more and more javascript frameworks will see the light to make the new features in HTML5 even easier to use.
Couldn’t they just expand their efforts in making flash capable of playing Youtube videos without using 100% CPU usage, or not having badly scripted flash adverts that kill your browser?
Or is Flash totally broken?
I know, shooting fish/kicking a man when he’s down and all that..
Well, now that the W3C and the WaSP have decided to do The Right Thing ™ by advising that web browsers become even more bloated, to the point where they reach the feature set and proven security of Flash, SWF is going to become less relevant as time passes.
The Flash IDE is here to stay for some times, on the other hand, since it’s exactly what a lot of web app developers look for.
(PS : About flash hogging your CPU and crashing, have you tried 10.1 ? On youtube, I get 10-15% CPU usage, even in full screen, and if I remember well I got some serious improvements by switching to the beta when I was on Linux…)
Edited 2010-10-30 13:13 UTC
Well that could be because I’m mostly using the PPC Mac version, but if it’s that good on Intel based stuff, why is it so hated?
Because it sucked for years and bad reps stick around? Truth be told it isn’t much better now, but compared to how crappy it was before it just *seems* decent. It still doesn’t hog as much CPU as Adobe Reader though.
Horrible performance on Linux and OSX (though it starts to get better), being proprietary, bugs crashing those browsers which don’t sandbox plugins, silly updating system…
Do you want a detailed list or would it be enough to say that flash player has sucked on non-windows platform for a very long time and only started to get (much) better recently with 10 and 10.1 ? ^^
Edited 2010-10-30 18:23 UTC
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