The great HTML5 and Flash/Silverlight Misunderstanding

When HTML 5's basic functions became widely known and started to be seriously developed to be the successor to HTML 4, Silverlight and Flash have become less and less relevant.

Or so many commentators on the blogosphere would have you believe.

This is simply untrue. When we get to the heart of the issue, we can see that the main arguments for the decreasing relevance of Flash/Silverlight err on the side of irrelevancy themselves.

The misunderstanding stems from a basic lack of knowledge in the industry. I've heard statements that go like this:

"HTML 5 will support video and various other media, so there will no longer be a need for extra plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight."

So let me ask you then, what kind of things have you seen Flash or Silverlight be used for on the web? Is it just for showing video? Of course not. Yes HTML 5 does support video, but Flash and Silverlight both offer so much more than that.

For the people that have believed in the FUD, I really don't think I need to get into the specifics of just how much more advanced Silverlight and Flash (more specifically, Flex) is. Do you seriously believe that 2 simple tags can negate all the uses for advanced coding on RIA platforms? That's completely ridiculous.

Even today, even if we're just talking about simple video streaming, HTML 5 is still not the best option. You hear it from the YouTube team, that it's simpler to do their stuff with Flash. You can think of the quality of streaming and the advanced streaming functionality that comes with Silverlight.

HTML 5 and Silverlight/Flash are not comparable. And don't even get me started on the business applications that cannot be created by HTML 5. That's a whole other playing field that HTML 5 can't even being to touch, and is always ignored by the FUD anyways.

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