Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Lord Error said:Especially since for certain browsers you simply have to fallback to flash anyway.
Right, but each year fewer and fewer browsers require the fallback, and it's past the tipping point now (>50% browsers by usage statistics support HTML5 video). Moreover, you don't actually need to do anything with Flash to do the fallback, you simply get a stock player swf (Adobe provides one which you can run hosted on their server). So in terms of actually having to develop for Flash, the figure gets vanishingly small.
We can also look at this argument from an end-user perspective. As a proportion of videos watched on the web, how many don't have an HTML5 option right now? A quick Google gives me that Youtube has a >75% share of web video traffic, so that's 75% there assuming no one else supports HTML5. I'd ballpark that Facebook is the #2 video provider online right now, and they use HTML5. In other words, for how many videos on the web do we need Flash? A small percentage, although obviously non-zero.
Also, do you really think that making an HTML5 video player with a Flash fallback is difficult? A significant amount of work or testing? Something that one person with average programming abilities can't do in fewer than ten minutes? Let me know if you believe it is. I will prove you wrong.
Making something more complex, like some kind of interactive presentation that combines videos, graphics, vectors etc, is incredibly easier in flash, and performance is often better too.
Is this statement more or less true than it will be a year from now? Is this statement more or less relevant than it will be a year from now? Is this statement more or less true than it was a year ago? Is this statement more or less relevant than it was a year ago? Provided we haven't already, is it inevitable that we will reach a tipping point?