> I think Flash will still be king until someone creates an authoring tool that can allow artists to easily animate something like this.
This is at least the second time I've seen the suggestion for an HTML5 authoring tool come up, something that would let designers and animators do what they can do in Flash. Adobe might incorporate HTML 5 as an option into CS at some point, but here, unlike w/ Flash, they don't get to spec out the language that everybody has to use.
Flash is the only piece of software I use that crashes constantly. As in nearly every day. Compared to once, twice or even as much as – gasp! – a dozen times per year when using all that other stuff I use.
It’s disruptive. It’s annoying. More so than spinning fans. That’s a minor annoyance compared to the crashes.
Why do you think that Flash running the same Ecmascript code would be an order of magnitude faster?
Flash may (currently) have more capabilities than browsers, but when matched point for point (e.g. video vs video, SVG vs vectors, Canvas vs procedural bitmap generation) I've not seen any evidence of spectacular performance differences, despite browser code running in a secure sandbox. And when there is it's rarely something fundamental, like you'd see comparing HTML5 or Flash video against a simple video playback system, just bugs and/or unoptimized code.
This really showcases what I think HTML5 will be great for: procedural/algorithmic content.
I think Flash will still be king until someone creates an authoring tool that can allow artists to easily animate something like this.
Someone go ahead and make that tool, I will buy it.