With that mindset, the current religious war in the web development community (though commonly propagated mainly by Angry Internet Men of unclear merit) about the relative merits of HTML5 vs Flash has grown tremendously in scope with the launch of the iPad and Apple’s latest changes to the iPhone 4 SDK agreement.

Suddenly, it’s no longer about Steve Jobs’ hissy fits and Apple/Adobe’s past. It’s now about what it means to be a developer, the tools you choose, the platform you wish to work on. It’s another apocalypse then; The corporations are taking away our anarchistic developer rights to go anywhere, do anything! Time to wave banners, and while we’re at it, choose sides. You know, good/html5/css/js, evil/plugins, or any combination thereof. Whatever.

Holy hell guys! Isn’t this the most BORING shit ever?

Listening to knowitalls babble on about standards and “what’s right” and future proofing, Jesus, how boring can you get?! Stop being so damn boring! Stop saying boring things! Go make some cool shit! Bouncing fucking gradient balls man, let’s go! HTML5 dudes, Flash dudes, jQuery dudes, all of y’all, go make some god damn gradient balls! Make some shape tweening text! Make text adventure games or drawing apps or art or music tools or publishing tools or an awkwardly animated horse that sings or something.

One of the best things about maturing as a developer is watching your horizon broaden.

Man, I love being a developer. I love looking at a screen and an input device and think about what I can do with them. I love digging into frameworks. It’s a ton of fun! It’s engineering, right? You put the thing in the place and pull that string over there and put some tape on the stick and push that and the wheel spins and goes buzz, it’s awesome! It’s the joy of making a thing. It’s why Lego is such a popular toy.

It’s when you start out with JavaScript and realize the similarities to Python and you start tinkering just to see how similar they are. Maybe you fall in love with Python. Maybe you feel straight Java is the next step, or maybe you go low level and dig into C or Assembler. Regardless, you can choose which way you want to go. In this day and age, rarely is there a point where what you made can not be moved to another platform in SOME way shape or form.

Why are there people out there so religious about their choice of language or platform? So jealously defensive about the way they feel things should be done? If there is any argument I have for Apple opening up its platform it would be this: Stop making development boring.

The more these beardy thinky-men are ARGUING over the politics of this shit, the less I wish I’d spent the last decade embedding myself in the business. Every time I hear a pro-apple or pro-Flash argument now, especially retarded shit like this; THAT is what makes me worried about the web as a platform.

More plugins man. More non-standard bullshit. Bring it on. Let’s get this diversity party started.

Some players want this Internet game to stagnate in the ankle-deep murky lukewarm waters of HTML/CSS/JS. For those about to rock that shit, in all honesty, I salute you; You are true, professional masochists.
For those about to raise that flag and proclaim it the future however; come over here, Buzz Killingtons, so I can punch you in the collective mouth, and I’d be honestly surprised if any of you have any real development experience; You’d know how much greener the grass can be.

The only player in this game that currently gets it is Google; The problem with plugins isn’t the notion of a plugin. It’s the framework, and the end-user experience. The end users people! Don’t you want to make cool shit for them to play with? Don’t you want them to open a website and be like..

WHOA. What the hell is this SHIT that’s going on in my browser window!?

Don’t you want to give them a sense of wonder?

Technology is magic guys! Why the hell are some of you so god damn obsessed with codifying it?!

As Apple show off their new poorly named bullshit device that hurts the world and further closes off technology from hacker culture (high five Steve, you’re a fucking champ), the question on many lips is “so hey, Apple guy man, if you’re intending to challenge Netbooks, where be the Flash support?” To which Apple has no valid response, and fanboys and haters roll into cartoonish catfight balls of fog and violence over the pros and cons of this decision.

The primary pro, as far as i can tell, is that hey yo, woop, HTML5 is coming, and you know that will do everything Flash does so HEY FLASH IS DYING YO GET OFF THAT SHIP WITH THE OTHER RATS CANT YOU SEE DEY RUNNING LOOL.

The wild borderline incoherent ramblings of the HTML5-as-ark-of-the-covenant crowd never ceases to amuse me. I’m first in line to say i’m happy the web is finally up to supporting a native video object. In fact i strongly prefer the YouTube HTML5 player.

But video is not what Flash is.

The big ish with HTML5 is simply that it does not and will not do what Flash can currently do, and applications written in HTML5 are web apps like any other. Web development is and has been for over 2 decades a collection of kludged up solutions and technologies working in awkward tandem. AJAX for instance isn’t a technology as much as a methodology, but consumers lap it up as though the web is actually evolving as a development platform. The platform itself grows at an absolutely glacial rate, but developers and serverside tech are getting better at hacking it.

You know that funky Chrome startup page? A few snapshots and transitions? It takes over two thousand lines of code to get that up and running. TWO THOUSAND. I have written networked multiplayer video games in that many lines. That shit is bananas, b.a.n.a.n.a.s.  How, exactly do you propose this “leap for HTML” will take over for Flash? You are delusional.

The choice here for Apple would be between Silverlight, Unity3d and Flash, three technologies in direct competition over a very narrow web market segment that HTML5 has no intention and little hope of filling; Games. The more popular choice for developers in this regard remains Flash, and with good reason. There is a huge community, the platform has reached a level of maturity its competition has to work their asses off to match, and the language offers easily portable code, good OOP tools and is an excellent springboard for graduating to more powerful compiled languages. The day i have to write a game in markup and JavaScript is the day i quit the business and never look back. Terrible languages being brutalized to perform duties they were never designed to do.

What developers like is what gets used. I challenge you to point out a good collection of small-team indie games developed using pure web technologies that have had any real impact. What Apple has done here is simple. They have barricaded themselves off from a market that challenges their business model. Don’t stoop to assume otherwise.