The Death of Flash? - "Spartans! Prepare for glory!"

Thu Sep 22 09:38:09 2011

Now, I don't normally shed my opinions in the way I'm about to, but the heralds of Twitter are shouting about the deathly demise of Flash, and have been for a while now actually. However, with an amazing chain of releases for ActionScripers out there lately, such as Starling, Alchemy, Stage 3D, Flash player 11 and Air 3, etc, one might hear the spine-chillingly celebrated cry, "Spartans! Prepare for glory!" coming from the Adobe camp - who seem to show their full support for HTML 5 & CSS3, might I add.

Well, we'll see. However, as much as the 'hell dining' sounds appealing, I have to admit that I'm not worried in the slightest. After all, strictly speaking HTML 5 is nothing without JavaScript, right? And all the script based languages are pretty easy once you learn one, yeah? The move to full-time JS coding for absolutely everything would be a piece of proverbial cake, no? (Sweeping statements, I know!)

As much as I adore flash and ActionScript 3, I'd most likely be quite excited at the prospect of a unified web under HTML 5. I'd probably shout from the rooftops that my life has been made easier. No more juggling languages to get different jobs done - just JS all the way!

But isn't how HTML was different depending on which browser you used the reason Flash came to be so popular in the first place? Not much has changed, you do realize?

In the end, even if flash does die off from the web, I don't think it will matter because nowadays (for me) Flash/Air is changing direction. It's becoming more diverse and looks to be evolving into much more than just a simpleton web based media. It's actually rather exciting. Like watching your child grow or something.

Someone on twitter also posted something like, it's not the tools we use that define us, but creativity and great ideas (paraphrasing here I'm afraid). But yeah, I agree and you just know that talent will come through no matter what the circumstances. So I say bring it on - long live Flash and HTML 5.