As a Flash developer and animator, I can say that after 4 months of playing with “HTML5″, (more specifically Canvas, CSS3, jQuery, and the video tag) I have some thoughts.
On HTML5:
- HTML5 Video is surely the most over-hyped technology of the 21st century. Embedding will require at least 3 different encoded video files. Three. Plus a Flash fallback wrapper. Not good. Plus some dimensions and encoding specs won’t work on some devices and browsers. And iOS renders mp4s with a nasty gamma shift (at last mp4s not made with Final Cut Pro or Sorenson Squeeze). It’s a nightmare – something has to give here.
- Touch events beyond simple clicking (muti-touch, gesture) are NOT handled well at all by HTML5, despite what the dead guy in the turtleneck said. You need three different codes to prevent default zooming, and even then the animation freezes on dragging, etc.
- I’ve yet to see any HTML5 animation/ interaction that looks great on mobile. Desktop/ laptop, yes. Desktop WebGL, hell yes. (Check out http://www.chromeexperiments.com/) Mobile, no. Performance of HTML5 on mobile does not (will never?) match that of a native app. Hardware acceleration, anyone?
- I much prefer the syntax of JavaScript to AS3 – it’s essentially the same as AS2.
- Style sheets, in general, stink. They often require lots of forensic digging to find out why a div doesn’t look like it should. Chrome’s “Inspect element” helps.
- Doing things immediately inside the browser with no compiling or publishing is kind of exciting (though you could consider jQuery a plugin).
- SVGs (scalable vector graphics) are invisible to many browsers, mobile and otherwise. Remember that if you try out Adobe Wallaby.
- Debugging multiple browsers is a HUGE obstacle, to coin a phrase. jQuery helps a bit.
On Flash:
- On newer Android devices, most Flash content looks great and performs beautifully. If Adobe had continued to work with Google, it could have been a major selling point for their devices. In fact, Adobe should sell the platform to them – though it may be too late now.
- Most large business clients use plain old IE. They can’t see much HTML5 for the most part. They can all see Flash.
- The “motion editor” introduced in CS4, to me, was a flop – very non intuitive, even more so than After Effects – too much of a learning curve. As was the endlessly, needlessly configurable interface. Adobe Edge looks a bit better.
- Flash got a bad rap as adware. It was too easy to make ugly moving banners – so people blamed Flash.
- I don’t think I can convey the essential power of this strongly enough: Flash content looks the same everywhere. Building something once meant that it was built, period.
