I've been following the recent Apple vs. Adobe battle the last couple months with a keen bit of interest. As a ColdFusion developer, I must admit to having a fondness for Adobe. While I don't necessarily like everything they do ($300 for CF Builder, really?) it seems Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, has made it his mission in life to bury Flash alive. The iPad pontiff even went as far as tell the Wall Street Journal that Flash was a "dying technology".

While I don't agree with the fact it's dying, Steve and a lot of Kool-Aid drinking technology journalists, out there have been touting the successor to Flash will be HTML 5. According to them, HTML is an open standard, therefore it's better. No doubt, open is good - mostly. Yes, HTML 5 will have canvas, SVG, and video, but bear in mind that the specifications for it are still only in draft form. The WC3 even says on their web site that vendors implementing HTML 5 functionality are "likely to find the specification changing out from under them".

While there's all kinds of nifty Flash-based content out there, right now Flash's pièce de résistance is video. Before Flash, video required you had to install a handful of awful applications. Remember Real Player, anyone? Flash made video on the web accessible to normal people, and sites like YouTube probably wouldn't have been as ubiquitous as they are without Flash. Unfortunately, with HTML 5 video goes back to being sticky.

There are a lot of companies including YouTube, Vimeo, CBS, and others that are creating Flashless HTML 5 video players, and they're encoding their content in H.264. While the HTML 5 draft does mention this codec (as well as others) as a possible standard, the thing is, H.264 is not open. It's proprietary. It's patented. This smells so much like the Unisys GIF patent all over again. Unless Qualcomm decides out of the goodness of their heart to open it up, methinks the royalty fairy will be working overtime.

Yes, Flash is proprietary too, but unlike HTML 5, it's here now. We all have it (except you iPhone and iPad users) and for the most part, we don't have to think about it. For the most part, it just works. As a web developer, I like what the future holds for HTML 5, but it seems to me that too many people are doubling down on a technology that hasn't materialized yet. So, before we all throw Flash under the bus, let's see how some of these things shake out.

One more thing...

Flash video itself really isn't a codec. While there are a number of different codecs that can be used, the default (and presumably most popular) is TrueMotion VP6. This technology is licensed to Adobe from a small company in Clifton Park, NY called On2 technologies. On2 was purchased last summer by... wait for it... Google. Yes, the search giant owns the company that puts the video in Flash Video. My guess is that by owning the company, Google no longer has huge royalties to pay for all those YouTube videos.

With that in mind, you don't suppose that Steve doesn't want Flash on his platforms because it contains technologies from Google, do you? I'm really not a conspiracy theorist, but that sure sounds juicy, especially now that Apple and Google are now competing in the smartphone market. Plus, there was that whole Google Voice thing . It seems to me that Apple pushing HTML 5 because it's open and casting aside Flash because it's proprietary is the definition of hypocrisy.

If I was Adobe, I'd kindly tell Mr. Jobs where he dock his iPad, then quietly pull all of their products from the Mac. Then, where would all of the graphic designers buying Macs get their software? When it comes down to it, Adobe and Apple both need each other. It's a symbiotic relationship -- Macs need their killer apps to sell hardware and Adobe needs the hardware to push their software. While they don't have to like each other, they do need to get along. If not for themselves, for their customers.