I was talking to a co-worker today and had a realization. HTML5 can never replace flash.
One of the primary goals of HTML and JavaScript is transparency, the accessibility to the code that drives the page. Exposing code so that others can learn from it. In fact this attribute is credited with the proliferation of the web. This poses a serious risk for some web content. If you produced a highly interactive, community driven game would you want you intelectual property (ip) exposed? Web sites don’t expose their business logic. No one expects Amazon to expose how they drive their shopping logic. If Poptropica, a popular game/community for kids, was produces in HTML and JavaScript anyone that visited your site could copy the code, modify it, republish it, and monetize that ip. Who would want that? So think twice before wishing that HTML5 should replace Flash.
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Umm.. First of all, are you aware of the existence of SWF decompilers and how easy it is to reverse engineer an FLA with almost no effort? The SWF specification is posted on Adobe’s site for dog sake! Any flash asset or content, be it code or string or image is just sitting there unencrypted and up for grabs. You can of course, as many do, try to make things more difficult by obfuscating your code, but it’s just as easy to do that for javascript too…
Secondly, Amazon is not a flash/flex app and they seem to be doing an ok job protecting their IP, wouldn’t you agree? The way to do that is good engineering, no matter what is being used for the client layer.
Lastly, what are you afraid of? Open standards are a very (very) good thing. You’re anti-Microsoft because it’s a proprietary piece of **** but yet you’re a fan of Adobe, the same awesome company who gave us the bloatware called Acrobat? Use the right tool for the right job… HTML5 is inevitable… take a chance and learn something new.
-fb
Yes. I am quite aware of flash decompilers heck I’ve used them for years. As for standards I’m one of the biggest advocates for them you’ll ever run across. Maybe you missed my other posts. Anyway the point wasn’t that standards shouldn’t be embraced but that they aren’t always an answer to everything. For example, no company that earns money off a service or product would ever expose their software’s business logic in JavaScript on their pages. That logic is, and always wil be, hidden in their server side code. Believing anything else is nieve. I hope that fun, entertaining, “flashy” intro websites do embrace HTML 5 and CSS 3. It makes way more sense for sites to use open source and standards based software than paying for a license for propriatary technology. Despite the fact that I’m a certified Flash Designer I always advise clients to use XHTML, CSS first and unless they really have a need to use something a cumbersome or expensive as Flash to avoid it. Games are not open source. Nor are they easy to produce. Nor would it even make sense to program them in HTML 5. I just don’t see HTML 5 as a good match for that niche. Flash was designed from day one as a cartooning platform (long before Adobe, Macromedia, or Macromind owned it).
these people are very funny…
open the world, free the world, everything is free now… html5, free web…
BUT, who will pay for thousands of dollars that a single student spends to get a good graduation and enough level to be able to enter Adobe or Microsoft?
who will pay for that? these free funny digital anarchists?
both adobe and microsoft know that these guys cost a lot, and they expect to be well paid, afterall they are the top.
if you pay a bunch of good programmers, you got the best, and that costs a lot in the end.
the latest studies and development cost a lot. to give a background for these people and make them working also costs a lot too.
why we had such big improvements on photoshop? even flash, even on apple´s products?
because whats produced costs a fucking hell lot.
how much is the creation and maintaining cost for photoshop or flash? >> hundreds of millions of dollars invested all along these years.
and how adobe will get paid, to then pay their top programmers, and pay themselves, and pay the investment on new researches?
thats why its proprietary. because they paid A LOT TO MAKE THEM. not a single Linux Company can beat it in financial terms.
so in short words, these funny digital anarchists are saying “cmon adobe, give us free what you spent hundreds of million dollars, because we want it”.
what i have to say is… open source is excellent for learning, but when you invest all your wallet into something, you wont give it to the world as a good soul…
these open source guys should understand that we have no obligation to give something, unless we want.
So i agree with you Joel, cuz i dont wanna give my invested money to someone that will monetize it at will.
“if you want it, go after, dont ask!”