the JOHN LAUDUN experiment

John Nash over at Adobe has published a great essay on his personal blog about the nature and status of Flash vis-a-vis web standards, functionality, and the iPhone (and now iPad) embargo:

I came to Adobe ten years ago to build an open standards (SVG)-based Web animation tool. I like standards, and I have some experience here. … Here’s a quick summary of my long piece below:

Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.
Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.
Talk of “what’s good for standards is bad for Adobe” is misinformed nonsense.
Flash will innovate or die. I’m betting on innovation.

Note that Nash actually worked on Flash’s competitor — remember Flash was created by Macromedia, then Adobe’s competitor for authoring applications — and is well aware of its history and its limitations. Most importantly, it’s a thoughtful piece with lots of details. No screed. No paranoia. Not your typical internet.

The news may finally be sinking in at organizational IT shops all around the globe: Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP is a security vulnerability so great that continuing to use it reveals a level of incompetence that no on wants to risk. But instead of beating IE6 or the organizations that grew to depend upon it relentlessly over the head, let’s admit that the root problem was that organizations were simply trying to make web pages to things that they could not yet do. We now call these things web apps and, well, everybody is doing it. It’s the coolest, greatest thing ever, don’t ya know?

The problem is that HTML is not an API, it’s a presentational framework. Getting <video> and <audio> in is one thing. Some of the other things we now expect web pages, er, apps to do is a bit trickier, even in the era of seemingly ubiquitous javascript. In order to do these things, we are turning to yet another technology that has potential disastrous effects … Flash.

So, go ahead and beat up on ActiveX and IE6 and all the fools who rely upon them. But look closely at your own infrastructure: got Flash?