Hello everyone, and welcome to the 1st ever post of the Expression Blog. This series of posts will feature articles by me and members of the Expression staff dealing with various aspects of web design and development, as well as discussions on emerging web trends and web technologies. As much as we can, we will try to focus on how all this web-related stuff affects Expression’s day to day work, and consequently the products we deliver.
As a first article, I’d like to talk about how Apple, specifically with the rising popularity of the iPhone and iPad, has radically changed website design and development.

To give you a bit of background information, it’s important to recognize 2 things:

First, that up until very recently, Flash animation was all the rage. For awhile, it was difficult to find a website without a Flash animation on its home page or as a carousel. It was also very common to see whole web sites built in Flash where every single element on the page appeared animated. For awhile, it seemed like Flash was going take over the whole web.

Second, when Apple released the iPhone a few years ago (and later the iPad), it made the conscious decision not to support Flash on those devices. There are a lot of reasons for this which I won’t get into here (Google it, you’ll find plenty of theories), but what it means is that if someone tries to view a site with Flash elements in it on the iPad or iPhone, they would just see a blank block…and sites that were entirely built in Flash, are simply not visible at all.

For years, the web industry held its collective breath. Would Apple relent and start supporting Flash? After all, Flash (owned by Adobe) was a huge player in the web field… [Dramatic pause]… Spoiler Alert: Apple won the war! As iPhones and iPads poured out of Apple factories by the millions, more and more people were using these devices to surf the web. Companies and other website owners with Flash content on their site began to realize that those mobile viewers could not see their site (or part of their site) and thus began the great Flash dismantling of the web!

Over the last year, we (at Expression) would get more and more calls from existing and new clients asking us to remove Flash from their site and replace it with technology that is iPhone and iPad friendly. We have even rebuilt entire sites that were originally built in Flash with standard ‘non-animated’ sites. For new clients that still come to us asking for Flash, I try to convince them that opting for that tech is probably not a long-term sustainable solution.

Does that mean we can no longer have animation on web sites? No, of course not. The new emerging standard HTML 5 has animation capability which does not rely on plug-ins (which Flash is). It’s a long way from creating animation as intricate and sophisticated as Flash, but it’s still pretty good, and I think it might even reach the Flash level in a few years. To me, the biggest acknowledgment of the waning of Flash and the emergence of HTML 5, is when Abode themselves (the makers of Flash) announced that they were coming out with an app to animate with HTML 5 (called Adobe Edge).

Does this mean that Flash is truly dead? No, and it certainly won’t be in the immediate future. Most of the online banner advertizing industry is Flash-based, and I think it will take awhile before that changes completely. Instead, I think that Flash’s focus will shift from animation towards being exclusively a video format. Flash is already extremely well established as a video format (called FLV), as can be seen by the success of this format on YouTube, and I see no reason why that would change since Flash video IS viewable on the iPhone and iPad using the YouTube app.

In conclusion, the Apple vs. Flash war has completely changed the way the web looks and functions. It has also profoundly changed the focus of web development firms as they slowly veer away from Flash animation expertise towards tech that is iPhone and iPad friendly.