Outside of the geek world, people don't care or understand about standards, versions, flash or javascript. They care about performance and functions.
If a device can show Youtube videos and web pages correctly, people will buy it. If it can't or if they need to install stuff, configure settings, etc, to make it work, most people will just ignore it.
Correct. But that's why it is up to the geek world to both provide that kind of user functionality while also building sound technology. By embracing and promoting the good standards and practices amongst ourselves this can be done.
On the other hand, I don't see any sites getting redone whatever html5 can or can't do.
Youtube has an HTML5 player which you can use right now if you opt into it. Other sites have begun testing out HTML5 as well. And certainly within my office we're already working with ways to implement HTML 5 features in a sound, fallbacky-ready, way. The neat thing with HTML5 is that it is EXTREMELY easy to write degrading HTML5 what works in HTML4/XHTML supportive environments.
And regarding Flash speed, well, Javascript is much slower to move a simple text box on a page, so it isn't even an option to Flash. If some flash stuff is processor heavy, it's up to bad programing and noting more.
Flash is fast? Weird, I think that the giant, monolithic, binary file download for complicated swfs is somewhat heavy most of the time. There's also a much bigger impact on flash sites due to clients with older systems. Even if you are a good coder there are plenty of times where it isn't code that is your issue. For example, if you are a designer and you like to use alpha blending... alot. You're gonna slow down your site experience a fair bit for people with lightweight machines.
Javascript on the other hand is inherently lightweight to begin with and with minimization techniques + caching of the text files means you can REALLY speed up your javascript. Of course, like Flash though, lots of flair and you will slow right now.
But. It's maybe worth mentioning that currently I've got a webgl demo-app running here which renders the planet earth with specular, multi-texturing for day and night effects, separate texturing overlays for clouds which are independent of the surface texturing, obj file loading with uvw texturing mapping support so you can go right from your modeling software to the internet... and the whole thing runs at 100fps+... all in Javascript. I've also got one which renders the earth and moon all to scale... 100+fps in a browser.
The fact of the matter is this though. Both Flash and Javascript have their place as tools in the toolkit. Flash is far less desirable though because of the artificially high cost of development. When the next gen of HTML/JS/CSS stuff gets into release versions of browsers Flash's foothold is seriously compromised. Until now the ONLY thing justifying the extra cost of Flash has been its ability to do things HTML couldn't. This will end soon and then Adobe will be in a tough spot being a closed source version of what other can now do for free.
Apple, for their part, will be fine because now they can tell Flash to take a hike and just encourage people to develop using those other tools... which they are already well on their way to doing. Incidentally, this has caused a bit of a trend where clients asking for mobile sites no longer get fancy device specific apps... it is now much much cheaper to just make a HTML site formatted for mobile plus you get coverage on way more handsets for way less hassle. epic win.
