Thursday, Feb 4, 2010    Text size: 

A perennial source of contention between opinionated designers, the choices of delivery formats for text, imagery, video and beyond, have been well documented and debated, with Flash emerging as one of the crowd's favorites — as evidenced in the widespread deployment of Adobe's technology, especially in the fields of rich-media advertising and video streaming.

But that's the crux of the problem: it's "Adobe's technology" — and as with any other proprietary technology offering, its interaction with other technologies depends on the vagaries of licensing minutiae as much as it does on any infrastructure limitations — hence the growing popularity of standards-based open source software.

And that popularity increased again with Apple's release of the iPad, which disappointed many critical observers with its lack of Flash support — renewing the format controversy once again. The company's popular iPhone also lacks support for Flash, leaving "blue Lego blocks" to indicate missing content that was not displayed — but this was widely expected to be addressed with the iPad.

"Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole web," Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch blogged. "We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen."

Enter into this equation the latest version of HTML, the language which is used to create most web pages, and which provides much of the functionality of Flash, but without licensing restrictions which would prevent the display of its "web standard" content types.

HTML 5 offers integrated audio and video support, along with increased interactive and display functionality, among other game-changing features and presents an obvious route to open source security — but Flash will hold sway, at least until the next generation of web properties evolves, say some experts.

"The Web (including video, games, animation) is too vital a platform for business, communication, and society to be in the hands of any single vendor," Opera Software's Bruce Lawson said. "But it'll be a while; there is a huge body of existing content that uses Flash."

Existing content isn't the only issue, however, and neither is licensing or the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad — there is also the current immaturity of HTML 5 and the lack of cooperation and advancement at times of even its most vocal proponents in getting the standard fully developed and ratified. There are also other contenders such as Microsoft with its advanced Silverlight platform muddying up the waters.

Adobe, for its part, views the Internet as large enough for both Flash and other display technologies to co-exist.

"Longer term, some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash, particularly with the more recent developments coming in HTML with version 5," Lynch concluded. "I don't see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future."

XBIZ recently reported on the controversy surrounding a "BangBros." screenshot posted to Adobe's official Flash blog as an example of the "crippled web" experience that users without Flash will be subjected to.