In a recent article by San Oliver on AppleInsider, Kevin Lynch, CEO of Adobe, said that Flash will continue to evolve. According to Lynch, “I know that there are certainly some who are working on HTML5 who are out to kill Flash…” Lynch added that he believes that both can co-exist. “He doesn’t see the push for HTML5 as a move to ‘kill’ Flash. If Flash stayed stagnant, it would certainly go away,” he said. “But it’s not going to stay stagnant. We’re going to keep innovating.”
As a designer and user of Flash and Dreamweaver, I think that as the web continues to move towards HTML 5 and other open standards, Flash will become more of an authoring program for multimedia content in HTML 5, Javascript, and the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Adobe is already doing that with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a front end for authoring HTML, CSS, and implementing Javascript functions. Flash could fulfill a similar function for SVG. However, Jacek Artymiak states in his 2002 article that SVG is a bandwidth hog compared to SWF. Is this still true in 2010? Are Steve Jobs jabs at Adobe Flash warranted? I don’t know. But if Kevin Lynch is true to his word, he’ll keep his finger on the pulse of the web community and allow Flash to evolve with the standards it embraces. In the meantime, the burden will be on the development community to design multiple versions of a project to use different technologies that will play on the myriad number of devices that are out there. That’s nothing new!!