It seems lately I’m seeing more and more posts on design blogs along the lines of “HTML 5 brings on Flash’s imminent death” and so forth. There seems to be a deep seeded disdain among many in the web development community for the Flash platform.
And understandably so, Flash is a closed platform, processor intensive, and isn’t renderable by most mobile devices.
What I think is often missing in this discussion is the fact that Flash and open web standards (HTML5, JavaScript, etc.) have usually had the following relationship – innovations in user interface design are released on the Flash platform, and then in time the web standards community comes up with lighter, simpler and more modular ways of using the principles of interaction using open web standards.
This is how interaction design on the web has worked for a long time and it has always been a good thing for everyone involved. With advancements like jQuery and HTML 5, we’re seeing things like media players, menu navigation, sliding content, slide loops, etc. moving away from Flash and into open web standards. This is a very good thing and it’s creating a better browsing experience for all. I’m just as sick as the next guy of web sites encoded primarily in Flash that just simply don’t need to be.
But still, the majority of awe inspiring, award winning, experimental web interfaces are being developed using Flash. Some of my favorite examples include Digg Labs, Marcos Weskamp’s Newsmap, the JFK Presidential Library’s We Choose The Moon and Invisible Children’s The Rescue.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that there’s a reason sites like these are being done in Flash by companies with vast resources – it’s either not practical or not possible yet to create user interfaces like these outside of Flash.
And for this reason I don’t think Flash is dying anytime soon, and I think rooting for its death is really just rooting for the internet to become a place of cookie cutter websites all using the same principles of user interaction. This whole HTML5 vs Flash boxing match should stop and be changed to this – how can we create better browsing experiences using open web standards and how can we use Flash to further push the limits of interaction design?