Flash vs HTML/CSS

There’s a war going on it seems between Apple and Adobe over web standards. I personally can see advantages to using both technologies, however I’m seeing a need to teach myself HTML5 and CSS3 and partially ditching Flash for many projects.

I become very frustrated when coding Flash. I was updating my portfolio site the other day and kept getting errors. Granted, the error messages are much better using Actionscript 3 than they were with 2, but it’s still frustrating. The really frustrating issue was that my project returned no errors when published in Flash Player 9, but kept getting errors when published to Flash Player 10. After many hours of trying to figure it out I gave up and just published to 9. I researched and understand the error I was getting, but it didn’t make sense in the situation I was in. Just annyoing.

I like that Flash is cross-platform and displays consistently in all web browsers. I value being able to use any font I want and not just Arial or Helvetica. I do think it’s a better user experience to download all of the information on the front end and browse freely, rather than having to load a new page with every link, like a HTML page does. However, the benefits are ending there for me.

I’m all about new software and technologies, but Adobe’s release cycle is getting to be a bit much for me. With how much they charge it seems almost criminal to come out with a new version every 18 months and expect everyone to upgrade. It would be more justifiable if they were major upgrades at least. It seems to me, rather than making as many improvements as they can at once, they opt to stagger them out between versions to have reasons to keep their release cycle. Seriously, are you telling me they didn’t think being able to adjust the opacity of multiple layers at the same time in Photoshop (CS5 new feature) wouldn’t have been helpful 5 versions ago?

I’m thinking I’d rather not be as tied down to upgrading my software as often and use an open technology to start building my webpages. Hard-coding pages isn’t the most fun activity in the world, but at least all I need is a text editor to do so. It also seems like the standards change less-frequently than do versions of Flash Player. Pages I build will be more accessible to more people, so why not?