Last August Advertising Age published an article by Garrick Schmitt on the demise of Flash and rise of HTML5. Schmitt is the VP of Experience Planning for Razorfish. In his piece, he made a number of points as to why Flash will die. A lot of them were misleading or ill-informed. Also, though HTML5 has a lot of new capabilities, capabilities alone does not ensure success of a new technology.

Schmitt starts his article by defining the word, “loading.”

“Regardless of how fast our internet connections get, it still seems that we’re perpetually waiting for our digital media – websites, videos, pictures, music – to load. It’s a twisted feedback loop: faster broadband begets bigger and bigger file sizes. All of which makes accessing that Flash-heavy product microsite a perpetual exercise in patience.”

The myth that flash is heavy, and causes long load times is one I have been battling with fact and frustration for years. The fact is that an image is an image, whether it is embedded in Flash or in a web page.

The culture of loaders is a result of two things: the first is style. Creatives, and most rich media developers believe that pre-loading (loading assets upfront in a larger chunk, rather than on the fly) lends a better user experience. The idea being that the user volunteers 15-30 seconds of their time looking at a pretty loading graphic, and in exchange they get access to the experience and information without interruption.

But pre-loading is a design choice, not a limitation of Flash. Flash has the capability of loading in its assets piecemeal just like an HTML page does. And if you were to add up the total load size and time of all the assets of a Flash application, and that of an HTML application, their sizes and load times would be nearly identical (save a KB here and there). This is illustrated nicely in Schmitt’s own article where he posts some of the experiments done with HTML 5. If you follow this link you will see something interesting at the beginning.

Look, it says “loading.” But it’s HTML. I thought HTML eliminates loading?

Another thing that prophets of Flash’s demise fail to consider is the community of developers (the people that make the websites). HTML developers have had access to tools through AJAX, DHTML, CSS, and Javascript for some time now. They could use these tools to create experience-driven sites. Sites that are more about form than function.

As processor speeds increase, the limitations of Javascript as an effective language to deliver visual experiences have all but dried up. So what has been the result?

HTML-based sites still tend to be information-centric (function over form); and Flash-based sites experience-centric. The reason for this is community. HTML developers are not in the habit of thinking in terms of pure experience over content. Flash developers are not in the habit of thinking in terms of content over experience. In fact, the opposite it true. Propose a content adjustment that will affect the experience of a site to a Flash developer or designer and watch the sparks fly.

In order for HTML5 to spell the death of Flash, proponents of HTML5 will either need to change the culture of current HTML developers, or convert Flash developers to HTML5. Neither of which is likely to happen overnight.

Finally, comparing HTML5 to Flash in its present state is like Microsoft comparing Windows 7 to the last version of Apple’s OS X. Thanks for catching up, but we are already on to the next thing. By the time HTML5 is available on a large enough audience of browsers to make it feasible for professional use, Flash will no longer be Flash as we know it. It will have evolved further, along with the community.

For example, at the time of publishing of Schmitt’s article, he rightly pointed out, “Today’s Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS are now supporting HTML 5, not Flash.”

Since then Adobe has announced that by early 2010 you will be able to publish Flash applications as iPhone applications, and submit them to the app store. There are already thousands of Flash developers ready and able to create mobile applications starting Q1 or Q2, 2010. The number of HTML5-ready app devs is far fewer.

Who knows what Flash will look like, or what a Flash developer will look like two to three years from now when HTML5 is ready. But I can guarantee it will be very different from what they are today.

For me, the net-net is that Flash is currently the best option to create rich media and Internet applications. It is going to take more than just a comparable technology to dethrone it. It will take serious missteps by Adobe combined with a mass exodus of the community. And I don’t see that happening for quite some time.