The flame wars are on!

CEOs, CTOs, platform evangelists and users are fighting the war of the worlds out there.
It´s HTML5 vs. Flash, open vs. closed, H264 vs. OGG, desktop vs. mobile, truth vs. lie.

Lets first calm down with this nice audio visualization before we dive in…



Since Steve´s presentation of the iPad and recent statements from him and Apple it´s clear that they are not going to support flash on their mobile devices.

This has triggered an ongoing debate on Flash, HTML5, browser plugins and web technology in general.

Unfortunately the whole discussion is rather uncivilized as there are a lot of people involved who make their living from those technologies and standards – and even more who use them on a daily basis.

So much has been written on this topic during the last two weeks… much was impulsive, exaggerated or plain wrong misinformation while few statements showed greater insight or were just watered down by irony and harsh language.





So I am not going to take part in this discussion with a detailed view on the technology involved or why one standard is superior to another etc.. sorry, but there will be no rant

Why?

Because this has already been done beautifully by others and because – it doesn´t matter.

What really matters is to get things done! To create content and to deliver it to the widest possible range of audience.

As a developer I don´t have the luxury of choosing my tools based on personal favor. I have to work with what’s best suited to achive the desired result – be it HTML, Flash or Silverlight or whatever may come along.

As a user however I have that luxury – I vote with every click and my wallet for and against technology that I consider to be worth my time or money.

So there is no point for these two groups of people to lash out against each other or certain technologies.
Of course this doesn´t apply to CEOs, CTOs or platform evangelists – it´s their job to influence the aforesaid groups on their opinion.

So what will all this mean for the web? Almost nothing.

The web has always been based on open standards while innovation was often driven by the “big boys” like IBM, MS, Apple and many others.
Finally this innovation gets adapted to open standards – as well as the economy assimilates ideas from the open source world.

And all this is healthy!

Sure – like in nature, it sometimes seems cruel and unforgiving, but whatever survives in the end may stay… just to be replaced by its successor if it doesn´t evolve.

And in the end everybody in this constantly changing ecosystem wins:

Companies get to sell their products and to rant about their competitors, developers get jobs instead of finally being replaced by generators, and users get more and more for their money.

So I am glad we live in a world with more than one operating system, programming language, browser, or pair of socks to choose from.

It´s the freedom “to choose” that makes the web/live so exciting.

Cheers!



PS: About the audio visualization experiment in the opener:

I wanted to do something with Five3D for a long time now and well – here it is.
You can load your own mp3´s via the right click menu.