Much Ado About Flash

The interwebs are all atwitter about Apple and Flash duking it out over Flash on Mobile Safari. Much can be read about it, so I'm not going to link to anything here - just Google it.

What I do want to say about it is - big deal. Get back to work.

Apple's position is essentially: Flash doesn't run well on mobile devices.

Adobe's position is essentially: You don't have the full web unless you have Flash.

Web developers are caught in the middle of a fight about something that simply doesn't exist. Adobe, until the last few weeks, didn't even have a version of the Flash plugin that would even run on a mobile device - AT ALL.

The iPhone's been out for 3 years. I bet if Adobe shipped a really great Flash plugin for mobile devices, Apple would support it in Mobile Safari. Adobe has squandered 3 years and now they are complaining.

Apple has moved on. They are saying: ship a good plugin or not. Doesn't matter to us. HTML5 does everything Flash does, and it does it better.

The problem with that is that Flash is really two things: the plugin, and the development environment.

Adobe makes a great tool to develop rich, interactive and creative web content called Flash. (Although, its quality is declining along with the rest of Adobe products because they are essentially becoming quite bloated, slow, cumbersome, difficult, etc).

They also make a plugin that allows that content to be displayed in a web browser.

They sell the tool. They give away the plugin.

My suggestion is a win-win-win-win for Apple, Adobe, web developers and web users. Adobe should create an edition of Flash called FlashTML CS5 built upon the latest release of Flash. In it, create a publishing methodology where the content that is created in FlashTML CS5 is generated into HTML5/CSS3 code.

Content developers get to use a tool they already know how to use to create rich, interactive and creative content. It would play on mobile devices using HTML5/CSS3. For desktop browsers that don't support HTML5 yet, it would use the Flash plugin. Write a little bit of code to wrap it up in that detects whether the Flash plugin is installed (it already does this) and if not display it in HTML5.

Simple solution requires some good software engineering. Both Apple and Adobe have quality engineers so they should be able to pull this off.