Sticking with Flash
Out of context: Reply #68
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- ukit0
Even though the performance stuff matters (more on mobile than desktop) I don't think it's the overriding issue. I mean, clearly Flash has some issues, but it's not stuck with the performance issues it has now. It's just software, people can fix the bugs, they could even rewrite it from scratch if they wanted to.
Same thing with HTML5 BTW. You'd be crazy to try to go out and build the kind of site that gabe makes, using HTML5, and Flash will be the best tool for that for some time I think. But there's nothing stopping HTML5 from improving either, and I'm sure it will. It's not even limited to HTML5 - apparently the WHATWG is working on stuff beyond that, like video conferencing, and that is moving forward. Or you can have third party solutions like Web GL, or, to take a simpler example, JQuery, that let you do things that you didn't think were possible with the underlying technology.
So the real motivation behind all of this is pretty simple, and has almost nothing to do with Steve Jobs or Apple. It's the objection against Flash not being an open standard, coming from the web standards community.
People who care about this stuff actually do have a large amount of influence in the industry. They aren't just some group off somewhere in an ivory tower, they are running companies, like Opera whose CEO invented CSS, or Mozilla, which has on its board the developers who created Javascript and the Apache server.
But the second, and maybe more important element I think are companies like Google, that share the standards point of view but also see HTML5 as a business opportunity. For them its all about creating a richer experience on the web so they can beat Microsoft. Flash is a weak link in that chain because it's the only element in terms of media they don't have full control over. Google are also practical, obviously (they still use tables on many of their layouts for instance) so they still use Flash for some things, but they are really going to be pushing HTML5 over the next couple years. Much more than Apple despite all the talk coming from Steve Jobs.