There’s been significant buzz in the technology press in recent months regarding Adobe Flash and HTML 5, mostly on the back of Apple’s announcement that they wouldn’t be supporting Flash on iPad or the new iPhone 4. In this post I’m going to explain why you don’t need Flash on your website, and how you can achieve the same look and feel without it.

Flash – the good parts

Flash is a plugin that is available for the majority of web browsers on all the popular Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OSX and Linux). It was originally acquired (and rebranded from Futurewaves’ product FutureSplash Animator) by Macromedia in 1996, before they were bought out by Adobe. It was originally intended to be a platform to add animations to websites, but this remit gradually expanded and it is now used to create video and audio players, as well as games. The best aspect of Flash is that once you’ve created your flash file it will display on all devices that have the flash plugin.

Of course that “best aspect” is likely to be the platform’s downfall:

Lack of compatibility in modern browser platforms

With iPad sales having broken the 2 million mark in just 2 months, and a significant rise in iPhone shipments in Q1 2010 even before the iPhone 4 was officially announced on Monday it’s fair to say that Apple’s mobile devices form a not-insignificant portion of the browser market. This is bad news for sites using Flash, as it is not supported on the platform.

I don’t want this post to be another breathless Apple-adoring missive, so let’s take a step back and look at the wider issue. Flash isn’t going to be supported by Apple because it’s not a web standard, and in 2010 the main use cases for Flash can be implemented using web standards such as HTML5 and Javascript. Apple won’t be the last technology creator to turn their backs on proprietary platforms, and there’s absolutely no reason that [insert the big buzz gadget for 2011]  won’t support Flash either. So essentially, you’re setting yourself up to lose visitors by using Flash.

What you can do to replace Flash on your site today

There’s plenty that you can do to replace, or augment, Flash on your website today:

1. Stop using Flash video players and replace them with the HTML <video> tag. You can do this today, and use Flash as “Fallback content” for users in old browsers, guraranteeing you maximum compatibility.
2. Do the same as above with Flash Audio players by replacing them with the <audio> tag
3. Use javascript for animations. There’s a huge amount of knowledge available on the web showing how to use javascript, or javascript platforms such as jQuery to easily add animations and effects to your site without using Flash.

So there’s really no reason for you to not ditch Flash and embrace web standards – your visitors will thank you for it.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.