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Hi Graham,

I can see where you're coming from with much of what you've said, but there is another way of looking at this - I'll confess now I am a Flash developer and have been integrating Flash into the educational experience for the last 5 years.  Far from being a Flash as it is today is far more the internet friendly format.  As an Internet Application development tool it can operate within the internet paradigms, protocols, connectivity and other quirks realising the potential of the internet as a much more unified and friendly experience for the end user than HTML ever has nor ever could.  HTML is a tool for static page layout not application development and as such constrains developers and users of the internet to a stilted experience.  Flash is a child of the internet era, HTML is one of the parents, but is from a different era - that of print.

Anyway, that said, when you ask I can't help thinking "what's platform agnostic about HTML, CSS and Java?"  OK I know what you mean (I'm writing xhtml and css for those reasons), but as developer my experience of standards implementation is poor - nobody ever seems to implement a standard version of any standard!  Java has come a long way recently, but using a Java app is still an experience that fills me with trepidation on any platform and is certainly not the plain sailing across the board it was intended to be.

While HTML or should that be XHTML and CSS are very much better than the old horror of the browser wars, there are still a great range of implementations differences that can make some page layouts a nightmare to get working.  While these are just finicky little things in comparison to the old days, it does bring me to a point that your article (in common with many that bemoan Flash content) fails to notice.  There are many X/HTML and CSS sites that don't work on all browsers, nor at all screen sizes - many don't print properly even when a style sheet for printing has been provided.  I can't for the life of me think of an occasion where anyone has decried X/HTML and CSS because of it.  Is this something that is inherently wrong with X/HTML and CSS or is this just either bad design, bad testing or simply lack of knowledge and experience on the part of the author?  Is it the faulty design and implementation of the technologies behind Flash, Java or XHTML that mean I've had a bad user experience with all of these, or because the author of some application or other didn't anticipate I'd be viewing the content on the device I was using?  None of these technologies (including Flash) prevent authors from considering viewers using other devices.  Personally I'd say it's a lot easier to consider people when using Flash, but I've been using it for a while and I have to admit that it hasn't yet been part of any design criteria I've implemented.  It's not that Flash (or any other technology) is bad for the end user, it's BAD DESIGN that lets the end user down.

I have to agree with your observation about Macromedia (now Adobe) blowing hot and cold with their support for the "device" market.  As a developer I'm always considering which versions of the flash player I should support depending on the market and the devices have always been at least one player version behind if not 2 or even 3 and it's never clear whether there will be upgrades for old devices or even support for certain new devices (Version is more of an issue than screen size actually - if devices other than desktops were being targeted then naturally we'd take screen size in to account, but writing for an old version of the player is usually a bigger obstacle).

Something that I hope could change all that, appart from the additional might of Adobe's financial clout, is the introduction of a brand new, written from scratch, Flash Player known as the Flash Virtual Machine 2.  Currently it is in public beta trials embedded along with the original Flash virtual machine as Flash Player 8.5.  The new FVM2 is so small that it can be added to the old player with very little increase in size, but when it runs native ActionScript 3 code (which is all it can run on its own) it has a minimum performance increase of x10 and as much as x1000 on some functions.  You could think of it a bit like the xhtml browsers available on devices - they're small and fast because they only have to parse a strict dtd and don't have to deal with legacy stuff.

I hope that this player, with it's small size and high performance could actually be seen embedded in devices such as phones, pdas, gamers and mp3 players along with the release of Flash 9 (Currently the only way to author in AS3 is using Flex2 - though some open source tools are likely to appear too).  The constraint to AS3/Flash 9 content wouldn't be much of a handicap, given the small size of the legacy device market, compared to the power that could be leveraged on the next generation of devices.  The way Flash is heading it's entirely possible that we could see a simultaneous release of Flash 9 on just about all platforms - though I may just be fantasising there . . . . 

Hi Phil

Thanks for your lengthy answer in support of Flash, I'd hoped that my comments would eventually generate some debate!

I must also confess that I also produce work in Flash on occassion and even before that, Director, so I'm not really too down on Flash however I do feel that until Adobe/Macromedia work towards making the player more available with a consistent feature set on more devices it's still a long way from being an "author once, deliver on many" solution that it was originally sold as to developers.

For example, the lack of a Flash player on the Palm OS platform is a travesty of monumental proportions and one can only assume that some politics have played a part in this ommission. The fact that politics could play a part demonstrates the danger of a platform standard that is not truly in the public domain in the way that CSS, HTML, XHTML, AJAX, etc are (along with their associated shortcomings which you are right to point out!).


When I said it was not Internet friendly I mean a couple of things. First search engines have a great deal of trouble interogating Flash applications and finding out what is inside them, nor does it easily allow external sites or pages to link to elements inside. A key concept of the Internet has always been the searchability and hyperlinking - Flash has not been good at this.

Other points are as you identify mainly related to bad design of which there is far too much. Surf around the web using your handheld computer, even one with a high resolution VGA display and you will soon find sites that with or without embedded Flash apps that don't scale appropriately to your device. This either renders the sites unuseable or very difficult to use.

Flash apps can, of course, scale but, like most web-sites they are rarely intended to scale to window sizes provided by QVA or VGA handheld devices. They might actually scale down but not not necessarilly intelligently and are rendered impossible to use. Flash still has a way to go to in the way that it handles type, for example.

So I will stick to my guns on this one. Flash is only Internet friendly if you have the right browser/PC configuration. The Internet was/is intended to be bigger than that.

I appreciate your points regarding the issues over the open source and public domain solutions but these have continually improved and with some fiddling around they can be made to work across platforms. Usually the problem is the browser on the host device with Pocket Explorer and Blazer both being pretty shabby but Opera is pretty good and free to education

Another benefit of these solutions is that they don't add a financial cost overhead to the device, something which has been oft muted about the Flash player where certain manufacturers (even well known ones) are being asked to purchase volume licences from Adobe/Macromedia to bundle with their devices or pay enormous upfront fee's to cover development of a device specific Flash player.

One can understand the attraction of getting a few dollars on every mobile device sold but originally the money was made from the developer community by selling their authoring environment at a premium. So a nice virtuous circle emerges of developers paying for authoring systems, support, dev-cons and so on while producing applications that feeds a royalty stream for Flash players back to Adobe/Macromedia.

Nice work if you can get it!

Maybe the development community should get the authoring systems free now?

 

On a wider issue the debate is about creating web-delivered scaleable content, i.e. content that looks good regardless of the host delivery system whether it be a 40" high definition net-enabled television or a QVGA net enabled handheld. I'm not sure that Flash is yet that solution.

agreed

hmm...

a scaleable content engine for mobile devices...

now there's a thought