The piquant Steve Jobs has been known to be outspoken in the technology bubble. And it isn’t much of a farfetched idea to notice that Adobe’s Flash has come under some scrutiny by more critical crowds; setting up for a debate on HTML 5 versus Flash use on mobile phones. Some iPhone users argue about Apple not including Flash with the iPhone, others are more interested in Apple’s technology. Perhaps by not including Adobe’s Flash as the standard on their mobile devices, it is Apple’s way of saying that if you want Flash, you have to go out and get it, or find something different; they don’t necessarily want to deal with a third-party developer, because of the inherent problems with that.

The near and far future of Web design deals with multimedia, especially Flash and HTML 5.

In his long-winded essay on Flash, Thoughts on Flash, Steve Jobs goes into the inherent problems of mobile use of Flash.

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.” – Steve Jobs

Technology lovers can agree that there are some drawbacks to Flash, namely the fact it’s not completely open source, if it all, considering it’s a proprietary platform. And while being a great tool for multimedia, it lacks sufficient depth in other areas like battery performance, and overall implementation for mobile devices. The recent release of Flash 10 highlighted some new text features. And with that ability, came the full implementation of dynamic text abilities, for example, being able to display a news website, say the New York Times, using the glory of Flash’s new text engine. The newer system in Flash 10 is called the ActionScript-based Text Layout Framework. This delivers rich typography to the Web, within live Web layouts.

Many industry experts believe that HTML is an evolving to become a multimedia powerhouse, so that at one point in time, or another, it may outgrow the capabilities of Flash, at least on mobile platforms. While this may or may not be true, HTML is a fully featured API, and Flash is too, but there are differences and divergences where they can grow; it isn’t necessarily wrong for Flash to break into the mobile market, considering their platform is multimedia. In essence, both API’s are fundamentally different, but also have some similar capabilities.

There is a battle between multimedia API’s, but there is a battle between every other video format as well. It’s a natural course for technology. There is no real danger of Flash being minimized in their marketplace, but HTML 5 will most likely grow, as more people adopt new technology, and remove older cobwebs from their Web designs.

Take Silverlight for example, a competitor to Adobe Flash, it enjoys its market share and is just as fully featured as Flash, yet they both exist and live on. Obviously, open-source is the way to go for software development. People enjoy the idea that they can grab hold of a piece of free software, and use it to their hearts content. And of course, I enjoy open-source software too. This is where the debate begins for any piece of software, like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight. It’s like the battle between Microsoft Windows and Linux–each with their advantages and disadvantages, although many people claim that one or the other is far superior.

The Adobe Flash white paper (PDF) highlights the capabilities of the Flash technology.

• A recognizable and complete system for video and multimedia development-and open source framework
• A platform that delivers content to the widest selection of Operating Systems, and other end-user variables
• Integrated development tools and workflow support, for front-end and back-end development
• Compatible with a large variety of open standards, easily integrated with Web, Java™, and .NET infrastructures

A short introduction and related book on HTML 5 and CSS3 (PDF) by Brian P. Hogan, Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today, displays the technology.

• Used for Web friendly applications
• New elements for defining site structure
• All kinds of embeddable items
• Extra markup, and advanced multimedia support in CSS3
• AJAX-the buzz word for Web design and Java for the Web

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