To say Ed Bott’s “piece calling Flash the new Vista”:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/sorry-adobe-flash-is-the-new-vista/2139 was — uh — not well received by Adobe would be putting it kindly. That effort, in itself, was worthy of praise. Ed’s “response to the discussion”:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/how-secure-is-flash-heres-what-adobe-wont-tell-you/2152 it generated was nothing short of Superman journalism.
Get some, Ed!
Browser plugins are a security risk. There “are arguments”:http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/are-all-browser-plug-ins-security-risk-449, of course, but I say, why take a risk that need not be taken? If business development has taught me one thing, it is that success is not about taking risks, it’s about mitigating them better than everyone else.
“This HTML5 demo”:http://www.craftymind.com/2010/04/20/blowing-up-html5-video-and-mapping-it-into-3d-space/ shows just how powerful HTML5 is. Click anywhere on the video while it is playing and prepare to have your mind blown. This kind of thing is difficult in Flash, and yet the author has achieved this effect using only his standard IDE that was never designed to support this type of special effect.
If I were Adobe, I’d be working very, very hard at a transitional toolkit that maps the Flash ActionScript DOM and scripting language to a JavaScript/HTML5 combo, all wrapped up in a slick, Flash-like IDE. Today we have Safari, Firefox, and Chrome browsers that support enough HTML5 to do cool stuff like this. By lagging behind, Microsoft only risks more defection from their browser platform, and Adobe could pull a major upset by rolling tools that incorporate open standards. It was tear down the wall between Flash developers and standards advocates, opening the door for a whole lot of innovation built on top of tools that Adobe controls.
Jefferey Zelman is excited about “the positive effects that the iPad will have on standards-based, semantic web development”:http://www.zeldman.com/2010/02/01/flash-ipad-standards/. So am I.