The New York Times has a good piece on why the iPad doesn’t have flash
Numerous developers and executives that I interviewed for my story said there was a trend toward offering users an alternative to Flash video, the predominant video standard online, in the form of HTML5, an open standard.
Senior-level managers from many of the top video sites online, including YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and Flickr, all agreed that video online is starting to splinter, and as some test out HTML5 for video distribution, many will begin offering both formats as the iPad makes its way onto the market.
(Read Why the iPad Web Demo Was Full of Holes – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.)
It seems obvious to me (and to many others) that flash’s days of prominence are over. More and more websites are using css and javascript with dhtml to produce the kind of sites that would have previously required flash. Coupled with the numerous video heavy sites that have begun to offer alternatives to Flash you can easily see that developers are starting to look in another direction. John Gruber has a very good piece on this too that’s worth checking out.
I think for all the moaning about the iPad not having flash, I think the bigger concern is what effect will the iPad have on Flash. If it’s even moderately successful (and it will be) then you’ll start to see Flash disappearing from web sites. Given how poorly flash often performs, and how good some of the alternatives now are, I don’t see that as a bad thing.
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