Is Flash part of the future of web development?

Please see the thread that is already discussing this very topic.

Evoken said:

With the recent iPad announcement and Apple's decision to exclude the Flash Player plug in from it's device (like in the iPhone and iPod Touch), a lot of discussion has been done about Flash and it's place in the future of the web. A lot of people seem to actually be against Flash and see things like HTML5, most notably YouTube and Vimeo's decision to support HTML5 video tags in their website, as a sign that things are moving towards a less proprietary and more open web that is Flash-free. Some, in fact, cannot wait for Flash to "die" and is replaced by a combination of HTML5, CSS and Javascript.

It also seems that among people who advocate designing and coding with web standards, Flash isn't well liked and is in fact frowned upon.

So my question is, what do people here feel about all of this? Is Flash something web developers should start leaving behind (if they use it) in favor of other things or is Flash a platform that has a place in the future of the web which web developers should use?

What do you think?

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I think this topic is being beat to death, and there is a lot of misinformation out there.

This post is a well written and grounded look at the issues:
http://nwebb.co.uk/blog/?p=399


The following post from this site shows a whole gamut of opinions on the matter, and illustrates how few of us are ready to make the switch:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/857473/

I think that HTML5 is long overdue... but is still not ready for prime time. Once they have browser compatibility and licensing issues sorted, we will see the HTML5 video tag replace a lot of the flash based video players. This is a good thing.

The HTML5 canvas tag is on par with Flash player 3 or 4, and one could make the argument that it is currently harder to develop for. Certainly *for the types of visualization work that I do* HTML5 and javascript cannot replace a powerful, strongly typed language like As3 or Java.

The simple answer is that there is room for both. Web technologies are adopted slowly and discarded even slower (Google yesterday announced they will no longer support IE6 for google docs). I have not seen recent statistics, but Flash installs (not downloads) still number between 8 million and 10 million per day. Even if HTML5 could entirely replace Flash, it is a technology that will be around for a while.

lucidmedia said:

Certainly *for the types of visualization work that I do* HTML5 and javascript cannot replace a powerful, strongly typed language like As3 or Java.

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That's an interesting opinion. How does the language's typing have anything to do with your work?

I could the APIs affecting your work considerably, but typing seems like its orthogonal to this discussion.

lucidmedia said:

The simple answer is that there is room for both. Web technologies are adopted slowly and discarded even slower

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But, but... how are we suppose to have a fiery debate!?

Edit: I meant to mention -- that is a very good summary answer and I agree and would in fact argue that not only is there room for both, but that both must co-exist (at least for awhile)

savar said:

That's an interesting opinion. How does the language's typing have anything to do with your work?

I could the APIs affecting your work considerably, but typing seems like its orthogonal to this discussion.

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Definitely orthogonal. Perhaps I am just "old school" but dynamically typed languages like JavaScript, Ruby and Python are harder to debug -- particularly as a project grows larger, more complex and contains live data of uncertain quality.