In light of the recent announcement of continued support and upgrades for Flash, I've been thinking more about the future of Flash in the new HTML 5 oriented climate, with more browsers shunning the use of Flash, particularly on the mobile platforms.

Now, I do think that HTML 5 is a good step forward, and it certainly should replace Flash for video content, especially considering that Flash only really dominated that space because of the lack of better support through HTML in the first place. However, on the other hand I also see Flash as a potential champion of these new technologies, as it has very mature support, and (if we ignore uncertain plugin support), it's still a great platform for games, animations, and cross-platform apps.

The way I see it though is that Flash has essentially two core technologies. The first is ActionScript, which I don't believe would be hard at all (certainly not for Adobe) to repurpose as a language for writing Javascript. In fact, I'm under the impression that ActionScript has essentially been an extension of Javascript anyway, so a lot of these capabilities may already be in place, which means a lot of the ActionScript APIs need not be hard to port at all.

Second is the vector graphics capabilities. Now, I expect these would be a bit more difficult to port into an HTML 5 setting, but with ever improving Javascript performance it seems possible that a set of Flash vector libraries could be created that can run directly in the browser, without requiring a plugin. Combined with the current editor for making it easy to build vector content, I think that such a capability would become very popular.

To me this would seem an ideal future for Flash, as it would position the Flash editor as a great way to develop games and animations for the HTML 5 web, and allow Flash Builder to continue to be used for ever more complex apps drawing on the capabilities of Flash and Flex. After all, Adobe's money comes from the Flash and Flash Builder, rather than the plugins and players. As a result it seems like eliminating these in favour of a set of HTML 5 Flash libraries would be a really great way to allow the wealth of existing content to go forward, and to keep new developers interested, as it would eliminate the uncertainty at the future of Flash.

Forgive me if this has already been discussed at length; I did try a search but couldn't find anything that seemed similar. But while I'm not a Flash fanatic, I think there is a clear, and strong position for Flash in the HTML 5 web, without the need to try and compete.