Death to Flash Long live HTML5 and JQuery
Its a slightly contentious headline but hey whatever drives traffic right? But seriously here at Second Variety were trying to do all we can to keep up with technological innovation and hence when we say death to Flash we don’t really want Flash to die we just think that it needs to either change or it will be killed off.
Recently we took on a project for Metis Arts – 3rd Ring Out. The site we developed deliberately eschews Flash for all elements except video. Why? Because of two reasons: the first and most important point is that we are not Flash developers, though we know plenty of people who are and indeed we have partners who work with Flash so we don’t have to. However we wanted to show that many basic animation effects can be achieved without the need for Flash. And the second: we simply don’t like having to use a non-W3C standards based technology to render web pages and content let alone another development environment to create it all. It simply doesn’t make sense.
One thing I do want to say is that we are indebted to Flash because of its widespread use. Flash’s Actionscript, although younger than Javascript, both being based on the ECMAscript standard, has been used more extensively to control animation and interaction on the web. Kind of like a precocious younger brother it has gone through a trial by fire and has come out the other side alive and kicking and now all the things that have been learned can be applied to Javascripting including advanced interaction, deep-linking and animation filters and effects. There are now a raft of purely Javascript based vector drawing applications being developed. The Raphael JS Library is a beautiful example of what can be achieved using Javascript vectors.
Cappucino is an Objective-J framework for creating desktop applications in the browser. Back in 2008 280North created 280Slides – a clone of Apple’s Keynote on the web as a showcase and ThinkVitamin blogged about this new framework extensively. That was two years ago but when it comes to doing interactive websites we still have to persuade clients that Flash is not necessarily the best technology for creating these sites for obvious accessibility reasons and because they are generally quite annoying, with long load times, often tiny font sizes, non standard and sometimes indecipherable navigation and then there are the browser crashes and crazy-off-the-charts CPU usage. Some of these problems will still exist with current HTML5/Javascript based sites but at least you can have a simple fallback to pure CSS and HTML without having to create a separate site!
Anyways rant over. 3rd Ring Out is our first purely interactive site and even it is still a far cry away from being fully HTML5 capable but we’re working on some applications that will make use of more of the groovy features I just mentioned and we look forward to sharing those with you soon. We’re also developing a fully HTML5/CSS3 compliant WordPress Framework to be used at first on our client sites before being released to the community.