The last couple of weeks more and more people are debating the future of Adobe’s Flash plugin. In most cases it’s particularly about the use of the flash plugin in video players all over the web. The reason for this is the video tag in the HTML5 draft that promises to playback video in a single tag. The second reason for underestimating Flash is the hype of apple refusing to enable the flash plugin on the iPhone and iPad.

Appart from it’s using in video playback, the replacement of other uses are being guaranteed by a lot of people. Some of them argue that javascript is a far better tool for making interactive websites. While this is the truth in some cases, arguments for it have been made trough a genuine misbelieve of the flash plugin and it’s uses in webdesign.

Probably the bigest dissidence is the accessibility of the flash plugin. Former issues like the disabling of the back and forward buttons, the absent of deeplinking and the missing ability for screen readers or screen translaters to read the page are used as an argument for proving the incompetence of the plugin. Meanwhile all of these can be enabled by using tools like SWFAddress and SWFObject.

A combination of the arguments are the foundation of the belief that a flash website can’t be indexed by searchenigines such as Google. While this was a valid argument a few years ago it isn’t anymore.  Since  the end of 2006 Google is capable of indexing swf files. Beyond that the using of alternative content is not only allowed by Google, it’s suggested as well. This means that you can have a full HTML page to explain to Google what’s to see inside the flash movie. Making the SEO argument more or less useless.

In my opinion Flash has a bright future ahead of it. Since HTML5 is still in draft it’s going to take some time before it gets fully accepted. The disagreement in appropriate videocodecs between browserdevelopers makes that there isn’t a certainty that there will only be one format to support. In addition the matching of Flash’s META tag and DRM support can take quite a lot of time too.  Finally the announced support for iPhone and iPad by Adobes cs5 release should bring promising times for the Flash platform and it’s developers.