this is portable

As I’ve said in some previous posts, I don’t really believe “HTML5 vs Flash” is really a battle. There is absolutely room for both in our tool set and the way web technologies are constantly on the move makes our jobs more interesting. Not surprisingly, some other great folks have made this points much more eloquently and elaborately than I have:

This post by Matt Kenefick does a great job explaining why plug-ins are a good thing and why HTML5 and Flash can’t really be compared apples to apples.

On A list Apart, Dan Mall explained why user experience matters more than what technology you use.

Reading articles like these pretty much leave me with nothing more to do than nod my head in agreement. If you feel the same way, I suggest you check out this blog that Jamie started to address a lot of the underlying issues that get us to the point of feeling the need to take sides.

This is an exciting time to be doing what we do. It seems like both the tools we use, and the devices that can see what we build are changing faster than ever. Having all these new things to consider — like the iPad not running any plug-ins or intensive JavaScript, for example — forces us to put more thought into how we build our projects. I don’t mean the choice of which “side” to pick and which technology to build it with. I mean the choices of how the tools/technologies we choose will work together to make the end product what it needs to be for all the variations of our users.

If that’s all too much serious talk for you, read Stop trying to make the internet boring or Flash as an attitude. We all got into this line of work because we like to make things, right?

In light of the recent surge in the HTML5 vs Flash debate making waves in our industry, I’ve been thinking a lot about education in our field. We often defend Flash by saying that much of the complaints — like not being able to use the back button or pointless animations that take forever to load, for example — stem from lazy developers or bad developers who just happened to pick Flash as their weapon of choice.

I think this is true. Designers and developers often choose to create a project in Flash for the wrong reasons. We tend to brush this off as if it’s not our problem. How can it really be my problem that someone else is using Flash to create a completely crappy site, right? (Feel free to substitute HTML5 for Flash in that last sentence, because that could easily happen as well.)

I want to believe that those folks are building sites like that in spite of knowing or having been taught better. That they made a conscious choice to make a site that fails on both aesthetic and functional levels on purpose. But then I find seemingly legitimate online Flash classes that are teaching lessons like “Building a Flash Restaurant Web Site” and “Building a Simple Site in Flash” or something similar. No HTML or user experience considerations are covered in these lessons. The essential theme of these lessons is that it’s okay to build a really basic site in Flash and forget about all those silly little details.

As an industry, if we’re teaching lessons like that, is it our own fault new designers and developers don’t know how to pick the right technology for the job?

Sure, not *all* classes are like that, but there are enough of them out there.

There are other things about education in our industry could use work in my opinion, but in general I think it’s pretty out of touch with how the really good work is done.