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calmchessplayer
calmchessplayer
Inspiring
July 5, 2010
Question

html5 the death of flash?

  • July 5, 2010
  • 3 replies
  • 1237 views

I'm thinking of spending a large amount of money on a school which teaches web development with flash being at the core of the courses ......I'm trying to wheigh how long flash will be mainstream because HTML5 is set to take over delivery of video.......should I be concearned with html5 ? Should i take the courses with flash or should I look elsewhere for web devlopment colleges?

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    3 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    July 6, 2010

    Hey calm:

    I would suggest you put allot of thought into what kind of work you see yourself doing.

    My personal impression is that a large part of the industry is migrating away from flash to other options where flash was previously used.  ( video / audio will eventually be html 5 everywhere DRM is not required. ).  Rich internet ads and banners are (probably) going to be moving away from flash or will be translated by flash to javascript converters.  see: http://smokescreen.us/

    Apple is also a factor.  They seem to have a beef with Adobe.  This is having a very real market impact.  > 2 million US web enabled devices can't use flash.  Depending on what kind of web design work you're doing this will affect your project.

    That said flash has serious perks.  The youtube post sums it up nicely.  Flash video is IMO the best option for secure streaming of online video files. Flash is also a fantastic platform for online games.  I *think* its safe to say that there are far more flash game developers then javascript developers and javascript game libraries.

    Honestly though... I don't recommend paying anyone to learn "web development".  Go get a computer science degree / art degree.  The "tools" you can pick up on your own.  More importantly...  The core of being a developer is that you are constantly learning and growing with the technologies.  If you can't learn them on your own you're not gonna last long.

    A
    Anonymous
    July 6, 2010

    The comment about focusing training on a general understanding of computing is spot on. The tools and technologies will come and go, but the core concepts will remain.

    The iDevice point will prove to be interesting over the next year or so. I have the feeling that the end result will be people complaining about HTML5 being a performance killer just as people complain about Flash being a performance killer today. As is the case with Flash, poor Javascript programming practices will lead to poor experiences.

    The video question is also an interesting point. Given the fragmented implementations, there are some real deployment complexities:

    1. The idea of serving all clients with a single encoding of a media file goes out the window. I suppose this isn't a problem if you only have a handful of media files, but what if you have a huge volume of files to deal with. A client of mine recently came to me asking about getting prepared to serve video via the HTML5 tag. The sticking point was that client has 45TB of H.264 and VP6 video in their library... and moving to HTML5 would have meant weeks of re-encoding to h.264/mp3 and theora/vorbis... not to mentioning doubling their storage costs.

    2. There is no streaming protocol defined in the specification, and I don't see the browser vendors doing much about that any time soon. Each vendor is free to implement what they see as the best solution (for example, Apple chose Quicktime for their implementation, since Apple is all about "standards" these days). So, I think it's safe to see further fragmentation of the implementations in this department.

    All said, I think the HTML5 vs Flash/Java/Silverlight/everything else hype will die down pretty quicky, and then we can all get back to what HTML5 is supposed to be (but so far isn't)... a common standard with consistent implementations.

    calmchessplayer
    calmchessplayerAuthor
    Inspiring
    July 6, 2010

    Thanks for your opninons and insight its helping me focus on making my decision. I know html,css, AS 2,0,3.0,php so i'd say i'm fairly rounded and will probably attend the web development school in August for no other reason than for the fun of it. They teach alot more than just flash such as w3c compliance which i could use a deeper understaning....Thanks for all the helpful posts.

    A
    Anonymous
    July 5, 2010

    IMHO... the right answer is to learn both. People have been singing the "------- will kill flash" song for a lot of years now, and flash is still alive and well. Given that HTML5 is still just a spec, and that support for the spec is very fragmented across different implementations, I suspect it will be a good number of years before it's poised to kill anything.

    Were I looking for a school, I'd be looking for one that teaches both todays technologies, as well as emerging technologies.

    A
    Anonymous
    July 5, 2010

    Hi Calm,

    "Death of flash?"  lol

    Just curious, have you found "a school which teaches web development with" html5?

    Flash is now ... and will continue to be!

    html5 hopefully, maybe, eventually will be.

    Here are Fabio Sonnati's thoughts from March 1:

    Flash player 10.1 will kill HTML5
    http://sonnati.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/5/

    And the YouTube API Blog thoughts from last week:

    Flash and the HTML5 <video> tag
    http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

    You are asking very good and valid questions.

    Personally, I and my team are comfortable sticking with all things Flash (including Flex, ActionScript, FMS, FMIS, OSMF, etc)

    Nobody knows the future.

    Should you be concerned with html5?  No.  But you should keep up on how html5 evolves and how adoption of html5 progresses?  Yes.

    As html5 adoption ramps up, there could be profitable opportunities to individuals supporting and implementing html5.

    However, html5 likely will not be breaking any new ground anytime soon.  At best, html5 will cover the same ground that Flash and Flash Video are still pioneering.  Meaning, the best talent to implement html5 will be individuals who have already solved the same problems.  And in many cases, these individuals will be Flash developers!

    Best of luck to you in your choices and in your continued career in building video experiences on the web and mobile.

    hth,

    g

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