Don’t worry, Flash isn’t dead yet, but it’s clear that the tides are changing these days, with more devices entering the market that do not (and cannot) have Flash installed. Frankly SWF is no longer the reliable format it once was. Yes you can reach 90+% of the desktop browsers, but what about the millions of mobile web users?

So lots of people have had the same idea: Adobe needs to update its tools to output in Open Web formats. Simple, no? Instead of Save As SWF, Save as Web App, right?

“But wait!”, I hear some Adobe lovers cry. Rendering across browsers isn’t consistent! The DOM is a mess! There are tons of CSS layout bugs! SVG/Canvas support across browsers is uneven at best! There are many features that aren’t even supported in some browsers yet!

Hogwash. OpenLaszlo foresaw this transition years ago. GWT does the same thing.

You Adobe folk are bright engineers. You just have to make it work. Exactly like you made it work, and continue to make it work, across Windows, OSX and Linux graphics systems. The rendering layer is at the browser now, not the operating system.

There are lots of JavaScript frameworks that help to smooth out the script and DOM bumps. There are tricks you can do until SVG/Canvas feature X is consistently supported. Someone already figured out how to render SWF files using SVG+JS, for goodness sake.

And guess what – two of the major browser engines are open source – which means if a particular feature is missing in those implementations you can put an engineer on it for two months so that in the next version of the browser, it will be there for you.

You just need to think ahead.

As I’m sure you are.

• Mark Pilgrim laments that the next generation won’t be able to tinker like we did
• Joe Hewitt sees opportunity in the big screen + sandbox approach
• Steven Frank: Old World meet New World (a must read)

I think Mark laments needlessly and Joe and Steven are right – but none of them touch on the role that the Open Web stack will play in this New World of Computing. Sam did. The more capable the Open Web stack becomes, the less we need platform-specific APIs and SDKs. Why code for iPad when you can code for iPad, Android, WebOS, Blackberry, Windows, OSX, Linux and Haiku at the same time?

2009 was the year I became convinced that one day soon the Open Web (HTML, JS, CSS, SVG) will supplant all those other cross-platform UI toolkits (Java, GNOME, Qt, AIR/Flash, Silverlight) as king of the heap. I’m willing to wager that in 5 years the majority (say, over 80%) of apps that need a user interface will be done using Open Web technologies.

There are advantages:

• No need for an SDK
• No need for user installs
• No need to install a runtime, plugin, libraries
• No need for user upgrades
• Multiplatform
• No vendor lock-in

There are (current) hurdles:

• High performance (improving)
• Interoperable vector graphics (coming… let’s see where we are in, say, 7 weeks?)
• 3D graphics (that will sort itself out soon)
• Video, Audio support (HTML5 will take care of that eventually)
• Better input handling (multi-touch events, gestures, whatever)
• File access (Firefox 3.6 is 50% of the way there)
• Easier networking (web sockets anyone?)

Make it happ’n Cap’n!

It will be interesting to see how the web development community at large reacts to this – I’m guessing mostly positive (as opposed to the backlash I saw regarding Google Knol). I like the test-driven aspect, but since all the pages are text/html, this makes it problematic for some of the technologies that I care about. It will be interesting to see how the project evolves over time as more technologies graduate and make it into Google’s view of the ‘open web’ stack (perhaps when those technologies shed some Draconian pounds). For now, I’ll just hope that SVG makes its way back into HTML5…

Anyway, congratulations to Mark Pilgrim for giving it its legs and pushing it out the door.