Thoughts on Flash and choice

There has been a lot of talk about Flash. People love it, need it and despise it. I wanted to add my most rational comment to the conversation:

There are a lot of websites with embedded videos that need to play. That means having Flash is a benefit to people looking at pages. Youtube embeds should work, there’s Vimeo, Veoh, Revver, ForaTV, Revision 3 and a lot more sites where you can play videos and from which you can embed them elsewhere. Both methods of playback should work. If these sites migrate to HTML5 eventually without losing functionality, that’sall well and good, but they exist now in their present form, and I’d like to watch them on a computer tablet, even if it uses my battery a little more.

I want Flash, others may not. The choice is important. People saying Flash sucks. OK great, not very helpful, but I can appreciate people having problems on their systems that I might not experience. I think parts of Google and Yahoo suck. But I might still want to see all of these sites for whatever reason. Therefore I welcome Flash 10.1 when it’s ready. There are a lot of developers of children’s games in Flash, sites like PBS Kids, as well as highschool and college curriculum that are successfully using Flash for many things right now. Why shouldn’t we have a choice to view it on our devices?  Sure, there could be security or battery issues, or slowness. It can happen. A lot can happen on a computer. That’s the downside of all the upsides. We as consumers and creators and manufacturers can prepare for the worst. Backup plans so we don’t have to suffer a dead brick because of a virus or mistake.

People who don’t want Flash, then don’t use it. It’s not that hard. Remove it from all your browsers. End of story. Just like we hear that Steve Jobs can choose what he wants on / off his platform, so can every website owner decide how to display content. They choose Flash, others don’t. If I want to use just text files for my website, I can do that. These choices are important.

When HTML5 and Javascript can do all the things Flash can do, and there are visual tools to make that happen, I’m thinking website designers will jump on board.  Some are even creating workarounds like Smokescreen. HTML5 is unfinished. Javascript requires coding knowledge, and the video embed for h.264 always that much better for the processor.  Nor is that video format open by any means, though it is prolific.  I’d like to have both, HTML5 and Flash video.

Again, if you don’t like Flash, don’t use it.  Don’t expect websites and webapps not to use it when for some things when it’s sometimes the best choice, being cross platform with all the features is has. Sadly, the part about Flash that works so well, also is overused in advertising. Flash allows ads to be embedded, overlayed and scheduled in to videos and banner ad networks. As annoying as those are, they keep many sites in operation.

That’s it.