Much has been written and said recently of the impending death of Flash, in favour of what is usually referred to – incorrectly - as HTML5.
I say incorrectly, because HTML5 has quickly become the most incorrectly used phrase in the industry. When people talk about using HTML5, what they are usually actually referring to is the use of HTML, CSS3 and Javascript (plus a wide range of toolkits that are available for it). HTML5 is really just a small subset of extra HTML tags on top of this.
Anyway, that’s the pedantry dealt with, onto the subject at hand. At Zukido our approach is to choose the right tool for the right job, so there is no fixed “this is the tech to use” answer.
There are, however, a few things to consider before dispatching Flash to history, and there now follow five points you should bear in mind:
The first point – and the one you should be most aware of – is that browser support for the latest HTML/CSS3 functionality, certainly on the desktop, is far from standard or consistent. The beauty of Flash is that it lives within a container inside the browser, and that container is consistent across all browsers, and all platforms. In other words, publish it in Flash, and you know what your customers are going to be looking at, and that it will work.
Secondly, Flash is widely available now, has massive levels of penetration and is installed pretty much everywhere you need it to be. New iterations of the major browsers – IE, Firefox and Chrome – will no doubt bring about better and more standardised CSS3 support, but for the moment, the Flash support is already there. True, if your user does not have Flash, they will have to download it, but ask yourself this – would you rather be asking your users to download a plug in, or upgrade their browser?
Third, if video is crucial to your operation, Flash is your friend. One of the more trumpeted bonuses of HTML5 was that its new <video> tag would render Flash irrelevant. The truth of this is actually an entirely different thing. Flash is used so extensively with video because it handles streaming superbly. This is certainly not the case with HTML5, which has no reliable native streaming support, and also doesn’t handle DRM correctly.
Next, it is frequently said that “anything you can do graphically in Flash, you can do with HTML”. This is not true. Flash is a mature graphics platform that lets you combine bitmapped and vector graphics and produce slick content. What’s more, it also has some extremely powerful animation tools, which far outstrip the capabilities of CSS3 animation. If you expect to have the same graphical flexibility you had with Flash, you will – for the moment - be disappointed.
Finally, Flash is not only a mature product from the point of view of your end user, there is also a design and development industry which is almost entirely built around the platform. The up-side of this is that if you commission work in Flash at the moment, and pick your development partners well, you can minimise the risk of technical glitches, project overrun and cost creep. This is not the case with HTML/JS/CSS3, where many of the most widely used toolkits and development tools are still not even out of beta version, and far from ready for “prime time”. So, there it is, five reasons we believe that Flash is going to be around for a while yet.
Nothing is set in stone, technology changes and evolves continually. There are few “absolutes” in this industry – sometimes Flash will be the right tool, sometimes HTML will. Different delivery channels complicate this even further – what might be right for web may not be right for mobile, for example.
In the meantime, here at Zukido, we will continue to do what we always do, and what has worked for us thus far – pick the best technology to suit the job at hand.
To read more on the subject, see the next issue of iNTERGAMINGi, due out in April.
