I have zero interest in Flash on my handheld. HTML is designed for all kinds of devices, and it's the real hypertext web. Most Flash-only web sites were created thoughtlessly and wouldn't be usable on a small device. Google's strong support for HTML 5 will make Flash unnecessary.
Multitouch would be nice, if only so the iPhone users don't look so silly trying to use the phone, though I prefer on screen controls so you can use the device with one hand.
What I'd rather see than this is constant optimization for the G1/Dream, which will benefit all devices. It would be a travesty if the G1/Dream were made obsolete by required new features before a few years pass.
ryan, my point is I don't want Flash in the future. HTML (for all its growing pains) is a thing of beauty, it emerged with the Internet disruptively and creates open, linked data as it goes along. Flash is a blob of goo from Adobe that is a short term solution to the problem of needing more dynamic, canvas level toolkits. There are so many entertainment and restaurant sites that are done entirely in Flash, where they're trying to create an "experience" when I just want to find out where they are or who's playing tonight, and can't or it is aggravatingly more difficult because some Flash designer, who for many purposes couldn't be bothered to figure out how to do it in HTML, made something that should have been handed out on a CD-ROM in 1995 and has no place on the modern web. Android getting Flash is a fail. I hope the iPhone never gets or needs Flash.
So flash is useless? How about: Flash games? Hulu?(megavideo...)
You know it would really helpful for developers too. For instance some games for iPhone are just Flash converted games.. so you won't have to sit and convert them..(if it is free it is good, if not then rewrite it)
Dking, then they would lose all the platform level features. The game would be bigger, slower, and eat more battery.
Anyway all this will be done with HTML 5 in a year. It has full support for the canvas and media. That's where everyone is heading - Google, Palm, WebKit (Safari/etc). We will see some level of cross-device compatibility for dynamic apps that use local features like location. But it will be based on standards and preserve the advantages of HTML.
If you were Apple, Palm and Google, would you optimize for an Adobe controlled Flash where you're constantly contributing to your competitor, or a multiparty developed Web standard where you can be a leader.
Re: huh Dude, do you actually work in web programming? I've been building sites for over 10 years. I am an ActionScript developer now, and know intimately the strengths and limitations of the Flash Platform. To say HTML is "a thing of beauty" is absurd, and you really undermine your credibility saying dumb shit like that. HTML is friggin hoax. JavaScript in the browser would be even funnier if it weren;t so sad. The one thing Flash has going for it over its browser-dependent ancestors is a relatively stable VM that runs on all target platforms as expected. Does Flash have issues? Of course. Are there dumbasses out there writing terrible Flash applications? Of course. But the market has proven that Flash is a robust and viable medium for online apps, especially video. You need to get your head examined if you think the people working with HTML 5 have a clue about the intricacies of video. Putting video on the internet as a business venture is a hell of a lot more complicated than you may know. I do it all day, every day. By the way, Adobe enabled "view source" in the Flash Player to further adoption of the language (and mimic one of the key strengths of HTML), but unfortunately it is not often used by developers.
@Huh While I agree that most Flash sucks, it is still the de facto way of streaming music and videos on the web. Until a fully streamable audio/video codec comes along that works (AND is adopted) on all major platforms, Flash will continue to reign supreme.
It sucks, because I too hate Flash with a passion, but there you have it.
Also, don't confuse markup languages (HTML, XML, etc) with multimedia technologies. HTML is not going to replace Javascript or Flash or whatever else comes along. For now, and in the foreseeable future, that will simply not change.
fashionista, that's interesting, and I might even take you seriously if you weren't such a potty mouth and obviously biased. The could have/should have info about what most Flash designers don't do is particularly impotent. For sure HTML has had some issues over the years as standards bodies and individuals struggle with its intricacies and failings. We'll see in a few years, or we can just look at the Web today and see how much important content is Flash (zilch, aside from a few video players). The good news is your skills will transfer as what you talked about is not unique to Flash.
Dmitri, quite right, Flash is the most suitable media player on the Web today, but that's a single role really, and is done as a single facet of an HTML site. I could imagine a very interactive Flash video player scooping HTML 5, but one of the goals of HTML is to make Flash unnecessary, as the Web should be entirely multi-party standards based. With the huge growth of mobile devices like the iPhone, Androids, Palm, etc, for the foreseeable future, it is not sensible to code essential elements of a site in Flash, and videos are best streamed today via a link to YouTube.
While I agree that Huh didn't really understand what he was talking about, I also think that your calling HTML a "friggin hoax" reveals an ignorance unsurpassed by Huh or anyone in recent memory.
Dimitri, maybe you should take a deeper look at what is happening with HTML 5 before calling others ignorant. I certainly do understand what I'm talking about. While I've very intentionally eschewed Flash, aside from the occasional embedding of Flash video, I have developed many interactive sites and follow the main direction of web standards, with experience of how the heel-dragging, meddling and inabilities of various players interacts. I'd like to see a future with no Flash, and it's likely to happen within a few years outside the playground/commercial aspects of the web, unless Adobe really pulls up its socks and forces Flash developers to do things properly in the way that xHTML forces sites to be more compatible and accessible.
@fashionist So AJAX web development is a hoax? Ill make sure to let the web 2.0 devs know. Ill bet they get right on closing down Facebook, twitter, linkdin and al the other HTML+Js hoax sites.
"Hai guys, shut it down, fashionista says that everything your working on is a hoax, yup just like area 51 and the cold war. I know it doesn't make any sense, but i read it on the internetz from a professional FLASH developer, so you know its true".
A 1 armed monkey could put flash video on the internet, its not hard and certainly not something i would go around bragging about while downplaying the language that makes it even possible to put it on the internet. Of course to even try to defend a closed source plug-in while calling yourself a "Web Developer" pretty much invalidates your whole argument.
Sure there is a place in this world for flash, but that place is getting smaller and smaller and if we are all lucky it will one day disappear into nothing like what flash did to the open source SVG.
"HTML (for all its growing pains) is a thing of beauty"
As a developer I couldn't possibly disagree more with this statement. HTML is an abomination that's holding back the entire software industry. Designing a simple interface with HTML, CSS, and Javascript is many orders of magnitude more difficult than it needs to be. It is far and away the most difficult language I have ever used, and I've used quite a few. It needs to die as quickly as possible and get replaced with something that isn't horrible.
If you want to see a markup based interface language done right, take a hard look at XAML. It's not an open standard, but it's truly a beautiful and powerful (and easy to use) language. HTML is pathetically antiquated in comparison, there are superior alternatives out there.
i doubt any of you naysayers know the first thing about what flash even does. HTML5 doesn't even come close. it's ridiculous to even make the comparison. oh wow you can embed videos.
if you think that was the primary function of flash you are pretty dumb
Just to clarify, I am a developer but not specifically a web developer. I work mostly in managed languages like Java and C#, with some unmanaged C++ on the side. I approach HTML as a person who is experienced at programming in general but who struggles constantly to get HTML and Javascript to play nice in any kind of complex scenario. When things do work, the code is rarely elegant or beautiful as it usually is with compiled languages.
I'm also not saying that a proprietary Microsoft standard should take over the web. That would be pretty horrible for everyone. I'm simply saying that Microsoft has developed an XML based markup language for user interface that is both significantly more robust as well as exponentially easier to write, so I know that HTML isn't "as good as it gets" for a text based interface markup language, and I would prefer that it gets phased out in favor of something much closer to XAML in design.
HTML was developed back when transferring large amounts of data was considered a thing of dreams, and the fact that we still use (and build upon) such an arcane system is ridiculous. There is no reason why a "webpage" can't be a standardized compiled piece of software. The fact that you have to "work" with HTML to make a page look the way you want it to and "check it" against other browsers, shows its problem right there.
I hate flash, but one thing is with flash, you load it on ANY platform that supports it, and it looks the EXACT same (sans-performance), you don't have to put in 2 API calls into your scripts for backwards capability, and, other then the HTML embedding, you don't have to test it on 5 computers to make sure it looks the same.
XAML and silverlight are great to work with, feel more like traditional programming, and give you consistant, relilable results. HTML was developed to make quick vertical slop via scripts when the web first came out (think geocities). Now-in-days we have to Frankenstein web pages together and hope that all our APIs talk nicely, ;
The fact that there still exists jobs to convert "photoshop mockup to working web page" and it can't be done 100% of the time (still no subpixel positioning) shows that HTML is not good.
@ryan And if YOU think that video and Audio are the primary standouts for HTML 5, then you sir are the less intelligent one. You got animations both 2d and 3d, you got Canvas which is life in browser multi-user vector drawing, the list goes one. Flash will die a horrible death hopefully sooner than later.
You could call adobe and ask them but they are closed for the week, hmm interesting.
Flash and Silverlight do NOT always behave the same way on all browsers and platforms, even when you're running the same version.
As a programmer who is quite familiar with Flash and both iterations of Silverlight (1.0 is completely different from 2.0), I can tell you there are LOTS of inconsistencies and bugs.
A Flash SWF that works fine on one system or one browser, may inexplicably crash on another. I know this all too well.
If you haven't inexperienced such problems, you're still green. Give it 10 more years and talk to me then.
Tell you what, you guys go mess around with some "neat" programming languages, I'll keep focusing on the open, hypertext and evolving Web which we have thanks to HTML, which you clearly don't understand (comparing HTML to a programing language is astounding ignorance) is critical as a universal open standard designed for any device, rather than whatever it is you think is so great about Silverlight or today's other branded kit. We would not have anything like the Internet from Microsoft or any other single tech company, so maybe you would be happier on a closed AOL or Compuserve or XBox land, where your programs work perfectly on computers exactly like yours (same OS, performance, libraries and general display/io properties). The web sites I develop are for government and health and are meant for everyone, not gimmicks for bored people, and fortunately standards are where the weight of the Internet goes.
The phone has 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which do the job reasonably well, though the Anna interface will likely leave something to be desired for many smartphone users.
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I have zero interest in Flash on my handheld. HTML is designed for all kinds of devices, and it's the real hypertext web. Most Flash-only web sites were created thoughtlessly and wouldn't be usable on a small device. Google's strong support for HTML 5 will make Flash unnecessary.
Multitouch would be nice, if only so the iPhone users don't look so silly trying to use the phone, though I prefer on screen controls so you can use the device with one hand.
What I'd rather see than this is constant optimization for the G1/Dream, which will benefit all devices. It would be a travesty if the G1/Dream were made obsolete by required new features before a few years pass.
kinda ridiculous to say most stuff wasn't written with hand held internet devices in mind so let's blow off the whole thing.
as if people can't make new content for the platform anymore... nope. can't be done.
ryan, my point is I don't want Flash in the future. HTML (for all its growing pains) is a thing of beauty, it emerged with the Internet disruptively and creates open, linked data as it goes along. Flash is a blob of goo from Adobe that is a short term solution to the problem of needing more dynamic, canvas level toolkits. There are so many entertainment and restaurant sites that are done entirely in Flash, where they're trying to create an "experience" when I just want to find out where they are or who's playing tonight, and can't or it is aggravatingly more difficult because some Flash designer, who for many purposes couldn't be bothered to figure out how to do it in HTML, made something that should have been handed out on a CD-ROM in 1995 and has no place on the modern web. Android getting Flash is a fail. I hope the iPhone never gets or needs Flash.
So flash is useless?
How about:
Flash games?
Hulu?(megavideo...)
You know it would really helpful for developers too. For instance some games for iPhone are just Flash converted games.. so you won't have to sit and convert them..(if it is free it is good, if not then rewrite it)
Dking, then they would lose all the platform level features. The game would be bigger, slower, and eat more battery.
Anyway all this will be done with HTML 5 in a year. It has full support for the canvas and media. That's where everyone is heading - Google, Palm, WebKit (Safari/etc). We will see some level of cross-device compatibility for dynamic apps that use local features like location. But it will be based on standards and preserve the advantages of HTML.
If you were Apple, Palm and Google, would you optimize for an Adobe controlled Flash where you're constantly contributing to your competitor, or a multiparty developed Web standard where you can be a leader.
sorry not that geeky about all this stuff...
Re: huh
Dude, do you actually work in web programming? I've been building sites for over 10 years. I am an ActionScript developer now, and know intimately the strengths and limitations of the Flash Platform. To say HTML is "a thing of beauty" is absurd, and you really undermine your credibility saying dumb shit like that. HTML is friggin hoax. JavaScript in the browser would be even funnier if it weren;t so sad. The one thing Flash has going for it over its browser-dependent ancestors is a relatively stable VM that runs on all target platforms as expected. Does Flash have issues? Of course. Are there dumbasses out there writing terrible Flash applications? Of course. But the market has proven that Flash is a robust and viable medium for online apps, especially video. You need to get your head examined if you think the people working with HTML 5 have a clue about the intricacies of video. Putting video on the internet as a business venture is a hell of a lot more complicated than you may know. I do it all day, every day.
By the way, Adobe enabled "view source" in the Flash Player to further adoption of the language (and mimic one of the key strengths of HTML), but unfortunately it is not often used by developers.
@Huh
While I agree that most Flash sucks, it is still the de facto way of streaming music and videos on the web. Until a fully streamable audio/video codec comes along that works (AND is adopted) on all major platforms, Flash will continue to reign supreme.
It sucks, because I too hate Flash with a passion, but there you have it.
Also, don't confuse markup languages (HTML, XML, etc) with multimedia technologies. HTML is not going to replace Javascript or Flash or whatever else comes along. For now, and in the foreseeable future, that will simply not change.
fashionista, that's interesting, and I might even take you seriously if you weren't such a potty mouth and obviously biased. The could have/should have info about what most Flash designers don't do is particularly impotent. For sure HTML has had some issues over the years as standards bodies and individuals struggle with its intricacies and failings. We'll see in a few years, or we can just look at the Web today and see how much important content is Flash (zilch, aside from a few video players). The good news is your skills will transfer as what you talked about is not unique to Flash.
Dmitri, quite right, Flash is the most suitable media player on the Web today, but that's a single role really, and is done as a single facet of an HTML site. I could imagine a very interactive Flash video player scooping HTML 5, but one of the goals of HTML is to make Flash unnecessary, as the Web should be entirely multi-party standards based. With the huge growth of mobile devices like the iPhone, Androids, Palm, etc, for the foreseeable future, it is not sensible to code essential elements of a site in Flash, and videos are best streamed today via a link to YouTube.
@fashionista
While I agree that Huh didn't really understand what he was talking about, I also think that your calling HTML a "friggin hoax" reveals an ignorance unsurpassed by Huh or anyone in recent memory.
Well la-di-da
Dimitri, maybe you should take a deeper look at what is happening with HTML 5 before calling others ignorant. I certainly do understand what I'm talking about. While I've very intentionally eschewed Flash, aside from the occasional embedding of Flash video, I have developed many interactive sites and follow the main direction of web standards, with experience of how the heel-dragging, meddling and inabilities of various players interacts. I'd like to see a future with no Flash, and it's likely to happen within a few years outside the playground/commercial aspects of the web, unless Adobe really pulls up its socks and forces Flash developers to do things properly in the way that xHTML forces sites to be more compatible and accessible.
@huh
Your heart is in the right place. Really. But your understanding of the web is more wishful thinking than reality (with no disrespect intended).
You wrote: "one of the goals of HTML is to make Flash unnecessary".
That is demonstratively false. Not mostly false, or matter-of-opinion false, but absolutely, 100% false.
Where did you get that idea? Who said that? Certainly not the W3C organization; I guarantee you that.
Anyway, I fully agree with you, in principle, that Flash generally sucks, but that is where our agreement ends.
Cheers.
D
@fashionist So AJAX web development is a hoax? Ill make sure to let the web 2.0 devs know. Ill bet they get right on closing down Facebook, twitter, linkdin and al the other HTML+Js hoax sites.
"Hai guys, shut it down, fashionista says that everything your working on is a hoax, yup just like area 51 and the cold war. I know it doesn't make any sense, but i read it on the internetz from a professional FLASH developer, so you know its true".
A 1 armed monkey could put flash video on the internet, its not hard and certainly not something i would go around bragging about while downplaying the language that makes it even possible to put it on the internet. Of course to even try to defend a closed source plug-in while calling yourself a "Web Developer" pretty much invalidates your whole argument.
Sure there is a place in this world for flash, but that place is getting smaller and smaller and if we are all lucky it will one day disappear into nothing like what flash did to the open source SVG.
"HTML (for all its growing pains) is a thing of beauty"
As a developer I couldn't possibly disagree more with this statement. HTML is an abomination that's holding back the entire software industry. Designing a simple interface with HTML, CSS, and Javascript is many orders of magnitude more difficult than it needs to be. It is far and away the most difficult language I have ever used, and I've used quite a few. It needs to die as quickly as possible and get replaced with something that isn't horrible.
If you want to see a markup based interface language done right, take a hard look at XAML. It's not an open standard, but it's truly a beautiful and powerful (and easy to use) language. HTML is pathetically antiquated in comparison, there are superior alternatives out there.
i doubt any of you naysayers know the first thing about what flash even does. HTML5 doesn't even come close. it's ridiculous to even make the comparison. oh wow you can embed videos.
if you think that was the primary function of flash you are pretty dumb
Just to clarify, I am a developer but not specifically a web developer. I work mostly in managed languages like Java and C#, with some unmanaged C++ on the side. I approach HTML as a person who is experienced at programming in general but who struggles constantly to get HTML and Javascript to play nice in any kind of complex scenario. When things do work, the code is rarely elegant or beautiful as it usually is with compiled languages.
I'm also not saying that a proprietary Microsoft standard should take over the web. That would be pretty horrible for everyone. I'm simply saying that Microsoft has developed an XML based markup language for user interface that is both significantly more robust as well as exponentially easier to write, so I know that HTML isn't "as good as it gets" for a text based interface markup language, and I would prefer that it gets phased out in favor of something much closer to XAML in design.
HTML was developed back when transferring large amounts of data was considered a thing of dreams, and the fact that we still use (and build upon) such an arcane system is ridiculous. There is no reason why a "webpage" can't be a standardized compiled piece of software. The fact that you have to "work" with HTML to make a page look the way you want it to and "check it" against other browsers, shows its problem right there.
I hate flash, but one thing is with flash, you load it on ANY platform that supports it, and it looks the EXACT same (sans-performance), you don't have to put in 2 API calls into your scripts for backwards capability, and, other then the HTML embedding, you don't have to test it on 5 computers to make sure it looks the same.
XAML and silverlight are great to work with, feel more like traditional programming, and give you consistant, relilable results. HTML was developed to make quick vertical slop via scripts when the web first came out (think geocities). Now-in-days we have to Frankenstein web pages together and hope that all our APIs talk nicely, ;
The fact that there still exists jobs to convert "photoshop mockup to working web page" and it can't be done 100% of the time (still no subpixel positioning) shows that HTML is not good.
HTML != a thing of beauty
just my 2cents.
@ryan And if YOU think that video and Audio are the primary standouts for HTML 5, then you sir are the less intelligent one. You got animations both 2d and 3d, you got Canvas which is life in browser multi-user vector drawing, the list goes one. Flash will die a horrible death hopefully sooner than later.
You could call adobe and ask them but they are closed for the week, hmm interesting.
@dan2600
Where are all you people coming from??
Flash and Silverlight do NOT always behave the same way on all browsers and platforms, even when you're running the same version.
As a programmer who is quite familiar with Flash and both iterations of Silverlight (1.0 is completely different from 2.0), I can tell you there are LOTS of inconsistencies and bugs.
A Flash SWF that works fine on one system or one browser, may inexplicably crash on another. I know this all too well.
If you haven't inexperienced such problems, you're still green. Give it 10 more years and talk to me then.
D
Tell you what, you guys go mess around with some "neat" programming languages, I'll keep focusing on the open, hypertext and evolving Web which we have thanks to HTML, which you clearly don't understand (comparing HTML to a programing language is astounding ignorance) is critical as a universal open standard designed for any device, rather than whatever it is you think is so great about Silverlight or today's other branded kit. We would not have anything like the Internet from Microsoft or any other single tech company, so maybe you would be happier on a closed AOL or Compuserve or XBox land, where your programs work perfectly on computers exactly like yours (same OS, performance, libraries and general display/io properties). The web sites I develop are for government and health and are meant for everyone, not gimmicks for bored people, and fortunately standards are where the weight of the Internet goes.