I would love to see Flash go away one day. The major advantage it has over “the rest” is the embedded video support which is truly excellent. That’s when you see Flash being used: on YouTube, Google Video and such. Not much otherwise. I suppose one other advantage is the authoring tool they provide, but that’s something that can be overcome. Getting an open (as in non-proprietary, royalty free) video format that is good enough is likely much harder.
Flash cant go away. At least not anytime soon, because traditional markup is not up to the task of the rendering the complexities of modern branding, marketing and communication.
This is why flash is still very popular and become even more popular. In fact the growth of Flash has never really stagnated and designers are using it more and more. Advertising is moving towards using Flash exclusively.
The only way out is that if HTML allows for better content structures and that CSS rendering in (all popular) browsers can deploy actual layout stuctures instead of hacking with floats. I am not going to hold my breath. Flash is here to stay for the simple reason that there is no alternative.
Strange, I can't recall any Flash ad from Google. Why so?
As for layout structures... ah, ok, I won't comment on that ;)
Hmm, Anne, do you not consider Theora a viable alternative for video? It is royalty-free and very well conceived for streaming.
Strange, Anne. Saying that Flash is only good for video doesn't strike me as particularly well thought-out. There are plenty of useful applications for Flash: it's a strong visual tool for any environment where branding or animation is required. It's the only currently viable animation platform for the Web. It's the only viable vector based graphics platform. It enables application logic on the Web that traditional HTML/JS combinations can't.
If anything, what should happen is the development and deployment of an entirely Flash based environment for interacting with the Web. Web browsers are relatively archaic at the moment when compared to the rich media capabilities of Flash. Hell, at work all we really even do is create sub-par applications that are forced to scale all over the place due to the problems with the web browser market.
I'd say Flash is on equal footing with standard W3C technologies like HTML. It solves different problems and should be used in context, just like HTML (although obviously we still abuse HTML for solving problems like "web apps" when we should be using something more like XAML). But to say it should disappear is to ignore a very powerful and important segment of the Web.
Well, it is wishful thinking that was Flash video usage dwindled in favour of a de facto standard Open video format but it sounds a good idea.
Now that Adobe is giving Actionscript to Mozilla and OpenSWF is on the market for sometime, maybeeee Flash is going to be something ... uhmm ... not THAT bad ... in a few years.
Anyway I assume, that the latest developments, are the tombstone on SVGs grave, so Flash has at least one good effect.
I suppose one other advantage is the authoring tool they provide
Apparently you’ve never used Flash.
It has to be the worst authoring environment in existence. Unintuitive, unresponsive, impossible to use without a mouse—essentially it’s begging for a viable competitor.
Ironically, a year from now Flash will have some of the most robust standards support in some areas: E4X and XForms to name a few.
Ironically, the reason it won’t die is the embedded user base of designers who program to, at best, Flash 5 or 6. You think DBA’s programming HTML are bad? IMO, the Flash community is where Web designers were before Zeldman.
I have also for a long time now called for a true open standards-based alternative to Macromedia Flash. I don't know what this is about Flash and video though because, as it has been mentioned, that's not nearly all that Flash is good for and neither do I think it was ever the main purpose. Mostly, when I see Flash in action, it's for much more than simply video.
Most seriously design- and multimedia-oriented communities consider Flash to be indispensable. Its capabilities seem to be a creative outlet for them. See Ultrashock for example.
I believe SMIL will be an alternative to Flash in certain ways but it won't come close to replacing Flash because it appears to me that it is much more limited in scope. There doesn't seem to be much progress regarding that standard anyway at the moment.
It has to be the worst authoring environment in existence. Unintuitive, unresponsive, impossible to use without a mouse—essentially it’s begging for a viable competitor.
I find it quite logical that an application with drawing as one of its most important functionalities needs a mouse to work with. It's like complaining you can't use nails without a hammer - there are of course alternative ways to use nails, but you'd need to be a masochist to use them.
I find it quite logical that an application with drawing as one of its most important functionalities needs a mouse to work with.
True, but 90% of authoring in Flash isn't drawing—it's nudging elements around, selecting objects in various windows and filling changing properties. There's no options for giving focus to its multitude of panels, navigating around the timeline, etc. Not to mention the fact that the keyboard functions that do exist will often inexplicably break. Keyboard access is no panacea, but you have to admit a better implementation would speed up workflow immensely.