Just in case there hasn’t been enough talk about the iPad and Flash these past few days, I’ll offer my thoughts, free of charge. Apart from my own personal preferences in technologies, my job remains the same: design beautiful, accessible, usable websites. While I still have to create workarounds for the ever-lingering IE6, most everything else is built around web standards. This insures that the sites I build will look and behave appropriately across different browsers, operating systems, and devices.

A few years ago, I would have opted to build everything in Flash because it averted the cross-browser issues. At that time, Flash was growing rapidly in market penetration, and it displayed content consistently in different browsers. Browser issues solved.

Enter the iPhone. What, no Flash support? Initially, I was quite bummed. However, as time has gone on, and as I’ve come to accept that Apple has no intention of supporting plugin technology on its touch devices, whether that’s Flash, Java, or (Microsoft, you should be so honored for me to mention) Silverlight. Jeffrey Zeldman emphasizes this in his contribution to the conversation:

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

I don’t know how successful the iPad will actually be, but it’s worth noting the hype. And the hype is big enough to create this huge stir regarding Flash support. There has never been a huge amount of mobile devices actually supported Flash in the first place, and the iPhone simply magnified that fact. But the iPad is now a Flash-less device that is magnifying the fact that people are browsing the web away from their desk on all sorts of devices. With the rise of these new devices, Flash’s market penetration is actually declining.

Kevin Yank sums it up nicely for web designers and developers in his piece iPad vs Flash: Developers, Choose Wisely:

The trend is clear: users want to access the Web on a greater variety of devices, and the only factor these devices have in common is support for open web standards. As developers, we no longer have the luxury of relying on plugin technologies like Flash, Java, and Silverlight if we wish to maximize the reach of the web experiences that we build…

Noting these trends, all I can stick to is the standards that most modern browsers hold to. Methinks I’ll be working less and less in Flash.