Nowadays the debate about HTML5 vs. Flash became really popular and a lot of misinformation is going on… My intention with this post is NOT to say that one technology is better than another, specially since I don’t believe that one is better than another but that they have different purposes, my idea is to show that there is a bunch of things that those communities can learn from each other… Please read the whole post before commenting. My intention is not to start a flame-war. – I’m an HTML/JS/CSS developer that happens to know Flash/AS3 too, not the opposite…
The technologies “aren’t” that different*
I think one of the main reasons why the HTML community is biased towards Flash – besides the annoying banners and “skip intro” websites – is that flash is a “closed box”, they don’t know how it works, don’t know what is inside, the source code doesn’t show up when you view the page source, a lot of people use the technology without a good reason, don’t know the pros and cons, don’t know available features, isn’t “standard”, etc… (people tend to fear/dislike what they don’t understand). Mac users also complain about the performance of full-screen video (which was improved a lot with Flash Player 10.1). I’m going to try to explain very briefly the Flash platform and to show some similarities but without getting into details about each feature (for brevity).
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