That's the most important point IMO. You can at least technically do high quality Flash like work with HTML5. It can still be challenging, but it'll only get easier over time. That Nike site BTW, doesn't run well even on the newest iMac we have in the office (less than 2 months old), and it obliterated my poor Mac Mini (I'll never even try to open it again), the experience is substantially diminished on iPad (thought frankly, better than desktop - see notes on performance), and large swaths of the thing are actually done in Flash anyway. I'm also certain no one bothered to test that on older or less powerful equipment.

HTML5 is the future, because Flash won't run on mobile browsers (not by choice, but it doesn't matter), and managers and other people who don't know any better have decided it's "better" (again the reasons why truly don't matter, it has been decided).

That irritation aside, there are some technical reasons for why HTML5 can be argued to be better, SEO, pushState/CMS integrations, etc. I'm doing one now (and it'll run on the iPad - if I have to switch from Flash in the name of iPads, I'll for damn sure make it work on an iPad!) that integrates with the server tech and uses pushState, etc. (with fall back for IE and older browsers). Some of these tighter integration points do make working in HTML5 feel more valuable - I still hate JavaScript and it's silent failures ("use strict"; helps, but it doesn't go far enough).

The thing about "HTML5" (and we might as well say jQuery), is it's harder and takes longer to do the same thing as in Flash (for now) so you've got project triangle decisions to make. Then there's getting it to run well on iPads, which next to no one does (or it's a nerfed or entirely segregated experience, like that Nike site), which makes you wonder why they bothered with HTML5 at all.

Kevin N.


On 2/22/12 2:52 PM, James Merrill wrote:
Another major concern of mine was seeing this site:
http://www.nikechosenseries.com/

That's basically Flash quality, with SEO, linking, native scroll, all the
goodies from HTML. Once it becomes easy to develop sites like that, I can't
see why using Flash would be better.

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