Comments on: E-books, Flash, and Standards

By: nero

nero — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:37:43 +0000

I do applaud the level headed approach that Dan takes.

I think the future of the web, is the marketplace.

Google has taught us how to find things. But, for most people, its found the same things, over and over and over again. Imagine all the interests of earth, then take the 1000 most popular, what is left? Like so many things, people aren’t as complicated as they seem. We are asking ourselves now, what suits us best, browsing the internet in search, or going to a marketplace? I believe, as do many others, that model best suited for our future interactions with most of our devices, is a marketplace of task specific applications.

So the past was home to the desktop computer. After awhile that got boring so we added the laptop. Soon, it became apparent that we needed a phone, and now, we need a tablet, and tomorrow, we will need what?

Yes the iPad is there, and Adobe kindly will allow us to compile our Flash apps for the iPhone App Store. (The iPad is a giant iPhone.)

And what is the application environment that will run across these myriad devices, being sold as an app, or accessible via the web? You guessed it, FLASH. What about getting old apps to run on new platforms? Flash does that flawlessly. What about rapid development putting designers in an environment they are most comfortable with? Flash. No muss, no fuss, write it once, publish it everywhere.

By: Adam Kidd

Adam Kidd — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:53:01 +0000

I do so hope we can finally use any font we own for display in HTML5, without having to use awkward workarounds (like sIFR) to keep things usable.

By: Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:13:14 +0000

Joe:

I’m going to hazard a guess that Evan is responding to the two *blurbs* and not the two articles—using the logic of one blurb to refute the rhetoric of the other.

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:41:44 +0000

Evan seems to have melded the two articles from this edition of A List Apart.

By: Evan Skuthorpe

Evan Skuthorpe — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:54:57 +0000

I don’t think Flash will die.

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books…

…and I don’t think standards based ‘design’ will replace other technologies either. Flash will no doubt always have a place, just not in any substantial way in standards based web sites. And I think it will shrink in terms of web site design (hopefully) but will still be there, somewhere.