Phelan wrote:amnal wrote:Modern html and javascript websites have superseded flash for many of the interactivity elements it used to be necessary for. And for whatever reason, though no doubt helped by being open official standards, they are extremely well supported with multiple competitive browser engines which avoid most or all of the problems flash has always given me. My experience is far better, and I don't really see why anyone would laud flash compared to this.
While I'm glad you've had a better experience, this is completely disingenuous. There's a lot of variance in javascript and css, if not html, between browsers. A lot of web developers complain about testing sites in IE to make them cross compatible with all browsers.
You're right of course, there are still problems, but I perceive them to be of a fundamentally different nature to those of flash, as well as much reduced in severity. This is part of why I consider the situation far superior now.
With modern web standards, we have just that...standards. Whilst there are differences between browsers, they're centred around working to fulfil these standards such that, in principle, they will ultimately all behave the same way. In the case of IE as you mention, this is a relatively new thing - the great victory of firefox was to kickstart the modern trend towards standards being important - but even then the most recent version meets many more html5 standards than was ever the case before. The traditional complaining about IE has always been because it
didn't follow those standards, thus making things harder for everyone in an (initially very successful) attempt to prevent browser competition.
Now, although we get some jostling for position in exactly how to do things we also get
competition. The lack of that is a big thing that led to IE6s web stagnation, it basically didn't change at all for several years. With competition, you can't get away with doing things really badly, because there are easily accessible and well known alternatives. In fact, it's more recently led to doing somethings incredibly well, with (for instance) google chrome existing partly just to run javascript really fast and reliably so that everyone else would want to catch up...which benefits google with their increasingly popular web applications.
In contrast, flash does not have competition. When it's slow, or buggy, or simply not available for your architecture you can do...nothing at all. So both in principle and in practical terms it's a terrible thing to rely on, it isn't accessible to everyone and cannot be openly improved beyond the closed development path that adobe choose to put it on. In contrast, open web standards can be and are discussed and improved in a way that makes the web better without locking anyone out.
Edit: Actually, perhaps to be clear I should say that flash does not have competition in the field of implementing flash's language, since it's not open and is very difficult to reverse engineer. It
does have competition in the form of modern javascript and html capabilities, and has proven severely unequal to that competition.
So no, things still aren't perfect, but I'm not sure there is a perfect solution and I much prefer this one because I can't think of a better way to do things. Flash, in particular, has many flaws both in theory and in practice.
I haven't delved much into HTML5 yet, but I believe the reason it exists, is to avoid a lot of the problems that exist right now.
One of the big things about html5 is that it makes adds a lot of new stuff like html video to the standard. This wasn't originally there simply because the web hadn't got to that point yet (hence flash happening to become popular as the best thing available at the time), but the standard is open and ultimately responsive to desired changes.
So...yeah, html5 exists to make things better, including solving problems and adding many new features. These new abilities, as above, cover a lot of what flash was originally popular for. Their being fully integrated into the page rather than as a plugin, and their implementations being subject to standards allowing implementation competition between browsers, has led to this way of doing things rapidly replacing flash in many places. It can be faster, easier, better integrated and less resource intensive or generally susceptible to flash's own problems.
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