Flash to Fade Out?

gizmodo.com/5574821/uh-oh-adobe-porn-industry-prepping-to-ditch-flash

So looks like the biggest Porn house is going to stop using Flash tech as soon as IE8 starts supporting HTML5. (I won’t hold my breath, IE8 has really lagged behind the other browsers in supporting CSS3 and HTML5 but that’s nothing new. They’ve historically done things their own way…

The point though is that, whether people like it or not, Porn leads in technology. VHS Tapes? Porn. They got into VHS (and picked it over Betamax) before most people had a VHS machine in their house. They led that technology. Same with CD-ROM’s and DVD movies and High Def DVD’s. Blu Ray won partly because of Porn. 3 months before Toshiba gave up on the HDDVD format all the porn studios had stopped producing in it, and had moved strictly to BluRay.

The point is that where porn goes technology wise has been a pretty big indicator of where the rest of us soon will be, and one of the biggest houses in Porn just said “Flash, it’s been fun but…”

Throw on top of that the previous talk from Apple about how they’ll pretty much NEVER put Flash on their iPads and iPods and iPhones and iWhatevers….So companies interested in all those people and the growing alternate means of accessing the internet will be avoiding Flash more and more.

Honestly… I’m glad. I’ve disliked Flash for a decade. Oh I’ve done stuff in it, and I’m not going to get into every single reason I dislike the format, but I will say this. Adding Media to your site, adding content to your site…that’s a good thing… But locking it to a format that god knows how many of your customers won’t be able to see, is just dumb.

Like if you’re a restaurant. Why have a flash website? One of your customers might be trying to check out your website from their iPhone before lunch to see whether they should go there. Not only should you not have any Flash on your website, you should probably have been smart enough to pay additional money for a mobile version of the site.

“I want a flash splash screen that the user has to play a game on to get into the site, like nothing hard, but it’d be cool if they have to drag like say pieces of a puzzle together in order to enter the site.”

That’s a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to something I once heard. Is the customer always right?

Lord no.

Flash crashes browsers. Flash is STILL not well read content and SEO wise by the search engines (it’s made forward strides in it, but it’s NOT as good as HTML) not to mention throwing in usability issues…You don’t want to make accessing your site and information on your site difficult.

I’m sure people will abuse HTML 5 to make poorly usable wesbites. It’s probably inevitable. Usability is important, and it’s tricky, but it looks more and more like the technology that will be used to implement usable solutions in the future won’t be flash, and I’m glad.