Phil, that's spectacularly naive of you. As PPK can tell much more, um, "eloquently" as I can, web designers are their own clique and they have their own view of the world. That view includes a loooot of iPhones, and iPads. (PPK article here: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/11/apple_is_not_ev.html - not for the faint of heart).
The amount of sites that have already made their website iPad ready is: lots. If we count every site as the number of visitors it gets, the amount of sites*views that aren't easily seen on a flash-free machine is dropping like a brick. Virtually all mainstream sites that you experience as flash today have a non-flash alternative if you browse to it without a flash device. Developing two solutions is a pain in the tusch, HTML5 can in just about every single case where flash is used as a non-game on the web today be as good or better, so guess which of the two expensive parallel versions is going to get the boot? But why would sites even bother with a non-flash version if the flash availability amongst ALL web browsing peoples remains at 95% and above? The actual percentage doesn't factor into it, relying on it is simply a fallacy. Some TV shows get renewed with less than 2 million viewers. Others get cancelled even if they have 9 million or more. Why? because the 25-35 year old rich people demographic is (perceived to be) worth a lot more than other brackets. Similar things happen with iPad/iPhone users: Their value is (deemed to be) far higher than others. For example, it seems to be rather popular amongst the first line web users that tweet, blog, facebook, and otherwise spread the word and set the trend. iPad owners also tend to be 25-35, and on the rich end. Are they actually more valuable? Who knows? Who cares? This game is about perception, not reality. Conclusion: Flash is going to die very very quickly as part of the web, and it'll be relegated to shitty vanity sites no one ever actually looks at, as residual enhancement for crappy browsers (read: IE6 and to an extent IE7), and as dedicated pages, such as the flash game world, where I expect flash will remain insanely popular for at least 3 years, probably longer. I also expect the current heavy competition amongst the new crop of popular browsers to put another nail in flashes coffin. Someone soon is going to tie the notion of a click2flash plugin to more security, citing (correctly) that having a wide open flash on your machine makes it considerably less secure, and start shipping versions of their browser with click2flash installed and enabled. That really will be the end for flash as something you use when, say, you want a photo slideshow in the sidebar of a hotel site or some such. Is this is a good thing? Maybe. Is this a bad thing? Could be. Is it going to happen? Likely. On Apr 2, 4:59 pm, Phil <[email protected]> wrote: > My point was not "nobody is taking account of the lack of flash on the > iPhone/iPad", but that sites have now had nearly three years to adapt > to the fact that Flash isn't available on the iPhone, and this has had > relatively little impact on how the vast majority of web sites using > Flash are designed. > > The proportion of iPhones that are out there, compared to other > platforms that do support Flash, is very, very small. The iPad won't > add much to that proportion. Net result? In general terms, nothing - > people will carry on with Flash. Unless a significant proportion of > your target market uses an iPhone or iPad, it doesn't make business > sense. > > And for those who have said, well, H264 will be folded in to HTML 5? > There has been no agreement on the codec to adopt as the standard for > HTML 5 with H264 and Ogg both with supporters in the HTML 5 working > group. I expect the codec bunfight to go on for some time yet. Pass me > a browser plugin! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
