Why no Flash on iPhone OS X?

[ben schmidt]

Flash on OS X seems to trigger both political (Flash=proprietary, HTML 5 = stds-based), and technical (Flash is CPU intensive and/or buggy) concerns. Either might make Flash an issue. Both guarantee it is an issue. So much so, that it's not available in the the no. 1 mobile browser, safari-on-the-iPhone/iPodTouch. Will Flash be available on the iTablet (or iSlate, or whatever Apple announces Wednesday, 27-Jan)?

Here's blogosphere luminary John Gruber adding what he knows:

Apple, Adobe, and Flash
Monday, 25 January 2010
http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

...ben schmidt

[Dan Millar]

It's interesting just how many companies are re-shaping their content for the iPad because of this issue. New York Times and Times, Inc and several other high-profile cutomers like Fox, Sony, A&E, Discovery and many, many more have announced iPad specific versions of their sites - Flash-less in other words - and Brightcove is one of the companies offering conversion to HTML5 to all their customers. (www.brightcove.com/en/why-brightcove/our-customers)

Apple and Adobe are at opposite ends of the spectrum on Flash - somewhere in the middle would be nice. I don't think either one of them can or should win this argument. I don't LIKE the extra work of multi-purposing a single website - but the tools will come, and we will learn to love them.

I have been on the down-with-Flash camp, but I would prefer an alternative, or a good-old fashioned compromise...

I think the iPad is pause for thought for a lot of content-providers, and we're at the pivot point in this debate.

Anyone else still on the extreme ends of this argument?

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

I have been on the down-with-Flash camp, but I would prefer an alternative, or a good-old fashioned compromise...

I think the iPad is pause for thought for a lot of content-providers, and we're at the pivot point in this debate.

Anyone else still on the extreme ends of this argument?

Setting aside how cpu-intensive Flash is or isn't, the use of HTML instead of Flash delivers more consistent UI elements and behaviour.  Learn how to use pop-ups on one site or how to make discontiguous selections in a list, and you've learnt how to do that on other sites. Learn on how to use a given Flash-based site and you really can't assume any commonality of UI elements or behaviour on another.

Furthermore, with the increasing importance of accessibility (e.g. Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and related acts in other jurisdictions), HTML-based sites have an advantage over Flash-based sites in leveraging accessibility features built into browsers like text-zoom, or in being accessible to screen-reading software.

That's not to say you can't do consistent UI or create accessible sites in Flash too -- but you have to put in the effort, and what's done in Flash today is all over the board. However from what I've heard, Flash does have polished, accessible development environments that don't (yet) exist for HTML5. i.e. It's a lot easier to put together slick, Flash-based graphics on the web today, than it is to do the same thing in HTML5/CSS/Javascript. Hopefully someone see's an opportunity and makes a mint.