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Adriaan Bloem

Good times for HTML

15-Feb-2010

Tags: Web Content Management

On behalf of HTML developers across the world, I would like to thank Apple and Google.

Specifically, Mountain View for dropping Internet Explorer 6 support, and in its own not-so-small way helping us get rid of the untold horrors IE6 has inflicted on stylesheets for the past seven years. And Cupertino for the advancement of HTML 5, by brashly ignoring Flash because, to sum up their sentiments, it's just not elegant enough. (Plus Flash doesn't have to be sold from an App Store, and wouldn't make them any money, but -- sarcasm alert -- I'm sure the company was mostly being altruistic about this.)

Now I'm sure few will weep over the eventual demise of IE6, but Flash is a different story. A large percentage of websites use Flash objects, and many developers have invested years of their lives into mastering the technology. Flash is ubiquitous. It's really easy to install, and offers a relatively easy way to get all those, well, flashy multimedia things onto a site that were impossible to achieve before Macromedia came along.

So at the risk of sounding ungrateful... what are the Flash apps we can't do without? Today Flash is mostly video, ads, and mini games. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I find that I can readily avoid adding Adobe plug-ins to various virtual machines I set up for testing purposes, with no loss in productivity.

And I won't be the first to argue there are various things to dislike about Flash. Let's start with accessibility problems, which are theoretically surmountable, but few developers do. Only a few search engines can index Flash-based content -- and Google isn't one of them, so Flash isn't great for SEO purposes, either. It usually doesn't scale well to smaller screens. And Adobe's claims of almost universal adoption aside, there are still far too many devices in my house that are excellent to quickly look something up on the web, but won't play Flash. Of course, all of those issues can be solved by clever work-arounds that allow a site to downgrade gracefully, but again, few do.

Unfortunately, a big hitch remains. HTML 5 isn't quite up to replacing Flash yet, if only because there's no deciding standard for video yet. So, as much as Google isn't going to arm-wrestle every enterprise into upgrading their browsers, Apple isn't going to kill Flash. (I'm sure Flash will be around for many more years than IE6.) However, in 2010, you can't just assume that Flash is always going to be available on any device you'd want to reach.

In the end, I can understand why you'd want to use Flash. Just be careful to weigh the advantages against the disadvantages. Don't let the joy over IE6's coming demise blind you to the fact that the web keeps evolving at a fast pace, and the span of time that you can depend on a single commercial platform like Flash is getting increasingly shorter.