Recently, Webkit announced CSS Animation – There are several articles claiming that this new feature could hurt the plugin space for Adobe and Microsoft … One of the most commented articles was posted on MacRumors Yesterday…
CSS Animation Coming to Safari, Already in iPhone. Less Dependence on Flash? – Mac Rumors
The incorporation of animation into CSS could certainly threaten one of the major uses of Flash on the internet.
I really dislike the author’s positioning of Flash’s major use on the internet as an animation tool – that was 10 years ago. When was the last time you saw “skip intro” on a site (unless it was created with template monster)? Yes, it still is a great animation tool, but it has matured into a great development platform; one, that is bringing revolutionary changes to the web.
Some of the comments on the above post are so fun to read because that are so illogical … why does Flash cause such emotion from developers:
I HATE FLASH!!! —–
Flash is a thing of the past, people who have disabilities like to be able to view websites and websites composed entirely of flash are nearly impossible for them to navigate. By using CSS it allows them to view the site, and have descriptions of what is going on through their text reader etc. —–
Yay! I hope Flash catches a computer virus and dies. —–
Animation, flashing, blinking, page sounds ruin the web. They are distracting from real content and used as a substitute for quality design. I hope that Apple provide preferences for turning off this sort of junk in Safari on both the Macintosh and iPhone/iPod. —–
No one should ever be talking about “when will Flash be on the iPhone,”, but rather “When will Flash finally die its long overdue death and make way for lighter better web standards?” Screw Flash and the horse it rode in on. —–
and my favorite:
Flash is slow, bloated and adds little value to the ordinary web experience. It SUCKS… —–
Ug! I don’t want to re-hash an older blog post about flash, but these developers are just missing the point. Flash, Silverlight, AJAX, CSS – are all merely tools. All of them powerful in their own way – all of them appropriate for certain uses. At EffectiveUI, we leverage the more powerful browser plug-ins (Flash/Silverlight) to create web experiences that move away from the traditional page based metaphors… In other words, we are creating software, not ordinary web sites.
Of course we use the other, browser based platforms when and where appropriate. I’m actually very excited about CSS Animation – but we will wait a long time to see how the standard is implemented across all browsers before we begin to recommend the standard to our clients…
One last thing … A simple plea to the technology community : drop the religious fanaticism for or against any particular technology – it shows your inexperience and your unwillingness to do your homework. Focus on the end goal: creating better software for people…
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