It’s great to see Adobe talking about these things, but to confine the discussion to just HTML5 is a mistake, and I can only assume that it’s one driven by a desire not to enter the broader discussion. I’ll quote my own comment here as no doubt it will sink into the middle of the mire, but I would love to see Adobe take Dreamweaver and Flash authoring/design capabilities and apply them to HTML5/JavaScript/CSS. Someone needs to do something in this area. However, for me it’s a general/specialist solution thing. Right now Flash plugs holes in the browser that won’t be there in 3 years time. It’s a specialist plug-in whose time has come.

“Flash is two things. It’s a browser plug-in that right now provides some specialist support for features not commonly available in web-browsers. It’s also a design tool that produces things that run in that plug-in.

The design tool has a future, indeed I would love to see Adobe take on the task of making building the HTML/JavaScript/CSS stack much easier. The plug-in itself and the applications built to run specifically with it feels much less certain, and certainly less desirable (fewer things running, fewer things can go wrong, less memory is consumed). I just can’t get past a site I was recently involved with where the customer’s #1 requirement was to run on SmartPhones. They made the decision that they would support Webkit browsers first, degrade smoothly into Firefox, and let the rest be dammed. It was launched six months ago, and despite the anguish they went through not building something that could run in IE+Flash, the site has been a huge success. It loads quickly, looks as sexy as hell, and just one year ago could only have been built in Flash.

I agree with many above, competition is a good thing. Times, they are a changing.”