Adobe Flash has long been the standard for rich animations and transitions on the web as well as being the de facto way of delivering video. However, with the iPhone spurning it, the iPad looking to follow its baby brother and competing technologies playing catchup, what does the future hold for Flash?

A few years back, it would be unthinkable to try and do some of the things that Flash is used for without actually using Flash. Today, however, the picture is quite different.

The main uses for Flash can be broken down into the following categories:

Rich animation and page transitions

This is what might push you toward Flash for most projects. Animations and transitions with complex effects are present pretty much everywhere on the internet, whether it be in banner adverts or to illustrate content on a web page.

Flash has had a monopoly on delivering this kind of polish for a long time, helped partially by a lack of cross-browser alternatives and other techniques having a bad perception due to poor performance and a history of bad implementations. However, in recent years much progress has been made to improve this situation. JavaScript libraries coupled with Ajax to dynamically load content combine to deliver animation and transitions in an straightforward manner that works on the majority of modern web browsers. More recently, the HTML5 specification has pushed the Canvas drawing API and CSS3 is starting to arrive with it’s arsenal of animation and transition-related weaponary.

It should be said that these technologies have only extended to web pages so far, and not to banner adverts. Also, Canvas and CSS3 does not currently work natively in the most used browser of all, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but there are workarounds such as the excanvas extension and this situation should improve further with IE9.

Typeface

The web has traditionally been a designer’s nightmare for using different fonts that work on all machines in an accessible way. Flash allows the embedding of different font faces which means that not only your Flash movies can fancy fonts are required, but thanks to technologies such as sIFR, you can use the fonts to replace text on a standard web page.

Non-flash alternatives are catching up, however. Firstly, there’s the excellent cufon that takes advantage of the HTML5 Canvas API and some clever coding to deliver fonts without Flash, but it has been hampered by font licensing issues. To combat the threat of font licensing, there are third-party typeface arbitrators to get around font licensing issues such as Typekit and the upcoming Fontdeck. And lastly, there’s the new CSS3 specification which allows direct embedding of fonts, although this currently has to support different formats due to varying web browser implementations, some of which have the same licensing issues as mentioned above.

Video and Audio

A vast majority of video and audio online are delivered using Flash. Since Flash moved into this area, websites such as YouTube have capitalised on video support in the browser. While video and audio aren’t traditionally where the focus of Flash lay, they have proved somewhat of a “killer app” for Flash and a consistent way of serving these types of media on the web.

With the arrival of HTML5 however, the introduction of <video> and <audio> tags is set to herald a new dawn of rich media that doesn’t require a browser plugin. The problem is again browser support and more significantly that browser manufactures can’t agree on the standard! YouTube and Vimeo are currently trialing HTML5 video that works with web browsers that support the h.264 video codec, so if you have Apple’s Safari or Google’s Chrome, you can check out YouTube’s implementation here or by clicking “Switch to HTML5 player” on any Vimeo video.

Small web applications

Another major area of functionality that Flash has been used to achieve is in the field of small web applications. For example, Flash can be used to add functionality to a web page to perform tasks that HTML wasn’t really built for, such as an interative photo gallery.

JavaScript libraries such as jQuery can provide an alternative by allowing web developers to deliver these kind of sophisticated types of web applications without having to resort to Flash or other third-party technologies.

Summing up

While the technologies above show what Flash is capable of and what it is now having to compete with, it by no means equates to Flash’s iminent demise. Flash still delivers the best experience for users over the majority of web browsers and that situation is here to stay for the near future. However, its dominant position is likely to be eroded by Apple excluding it from their flagship devices, as well as companies such as Google increasingly delivering their vast amount of YouTube content in HTML5 video format, as well as focusing on HTML5 and CSS3 for developing their web applications such as Google Docs.