A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

If you wanted interactivity on a website that went beyond scrolling marquees, blinking text and hover states; you had to use Flash. I grew up in this age of web design and thought of Flash as the single greatest thing to happen to web development since the introduction of CSS. However, Flash was not without its faults.

SEO and accessibility are buzzwords that are being thrown around a lot by marketers and executives, but they are fundamental parts to any website, and Flash support for these was terrible at best.

A New hope

In recent years there have been a number of alternatives to Flash that have begun to surface. On their own they don’t do much, but when combined they stand a real chance of replacing the software that has dominated the interactive web for so many years. I am of course talking about HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. A lot of people talk about HTML5 being the Flash killer, but the fact is there’s not a lot you can do with HTML5 without at least one of the other two technologies. That being said, for the sake of ease I will refer to the combination of the three technologies as simply HTML5 for the rest of the article.

The HTML5 Vs Flash debate has gone on for some time now. A quick Google search for HTML5 vs Flash will bring up thousands of results, some in favour of Flash, some for HTML5 and a great deal that simply cannot make up their mind.

A lot of people fear the arrival of HTML5; but fear is the path to the dark side; we should embrace new technologies. HTML5 has a very open community. If you see a feature you like on a site all you need to do is right-click and look at the source to see how it was made; I believe openness and sharing is a powerful thing and is key to moving the web forward.

Of course nothing is perfect; HTML5 has its faults as well. For example, HTML5 lacks support for a lot of features that are standard on Flash applications and anyone that has had to develop with support for older browsers will know that HTML5 and CSS3 cause a lot more trouble than they’re worth sometimes.

The Empire Strike back

In April 2010 Adobe were dealt probably the biggest blow to their battle for web supremacy, as industry giants Apple announced that their mobile operating system wouldn’t support Flash and would instead favour HTML5. This was a massive setback and continues to grow into a bigger and bigger problem for Adobe. Since that announcement the iPhone has grown by epic proportions and the iPad (using a similar OS) has dominated the tablet market, that’s a lot of people who can’t use Flash on-the-go.

Developers everywhere have realised this and have begun to move away from Flash in favour of HTML5. Flash may still be used on around half of the world’s top websites but this figure is dropping quickly.

Return of the Jedi

There are still a lot of developers that favour Flash as its familiar to them. They know it works and you can still do a lot of things with it that HTML5 simply cannot do; yet. This article is not an argument for which is better, I’m simply outlining the pros and cons of each technology along with their history and my personal opinions on the matter.

So should you use Flash or HTML5 for your next website or application? That’s entirely up to you. Try to weigh up the pros and cons of using each technology on your project and that should help you find the answer. If you’ve only used Flash in the past I would strongly suggest learning HTML5 as soon as you can, as Flash may not be around forever. As a great Jedi once said,“Always in motion is the future.”