As Twain once wrote, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".
While Fake Steve Jobs may be a good bit of parody, he's plugged into a
popular meme of web developers these days. Flash is on it's way out but
there is a huge installed base of sites using it and developers who know
how to make Flash movies. Like the demise of IE6, it will take some time
for all this to wind down and peter out. But how did we get here - here
being ubiquitous flash on every desktop.
In the past Flash solved a number of tough points of pain for web
developers. First there was a pile of cross-browser quirks and issues
which made it difficult to make anything reasonably complex work across
browsers and platforms. In recent years most of this has gone away with
the adoption of web standards by both developers and browsers. What
little differences there are are now hidden behind libraries like jQuery
and Dojo. A second big driver to Flash was the lack of media support in
the 'backplane' of the browser. You couldn't play a video or stream
audio without help from a plugin. So if you're going to use a plugin,
why not use one that lets you do fancy-cross browser GUIs as well as
play media. Flash became "it" for media, but with html5 modern browsers
no longer need this crutch for media. Another thing browsers lacked was
all the fancy animations and such as cross-fade, wipes, twirls, filters
etc. With modern JS libraries and the CSS3 stuff that limitation has
also gone away as you can set ease-ins, ease-outs, timed animation
sequences and all kinds of crazy stuff. The last big piece was just
plain old vector graphics. If you wanted to draw a diagonal line or make
a circle in HTML you were pretty much limited to placing a jillion empty
spans to make dots in an arrangement that looked like a line or circle.
Tedious to implement and slow to execute. Now there is canvas and svg
which let you do full vector and bitmap based graphics.
So here we are, with all the pieces coming together in the latest
browser. All the main drivers towards flash are now available in open
standards-based solutions. These standards aren't beholden to any one
vendor of developer tools, browsers or assistive technology APIs. That
means anyone can jump in to make stuff with just a text editor. It also
shifts the onus and motivation for accessible implementation of the
content rendering from a third party plugin to the core of the browser.
That's a good thing when it comes to Safari and OSX. No more finger
pointing between Adobe and Apple as to why Flash was not accessible. The
standards are open and Apple owns the code to their browser.
Now if they could just hammer out the closed captioning bits on the
video tag - but you have to expect a few potholes.
CB
Nicolai Svendsen wrote:
Hi,
Whoa, that's like...allout. I'm not sure what to say. Did I expect
this? No.
Well, if no one figured this one out, Flash support is apparently
being removed from OS X. I thought I'd be the first to post this. I
don't think anyone else has. Same reasons that were made public in
Steve's letter on thoughts on Flash.
Regards,
Nic
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