Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas

HTML and Javascript are object code at last.<p>As far as I can tell, people use Flash because the development tools are fantastic, not because they're married to the SWF output. This seems like the best of both worlds.

With this as an (awesome) reality, I can see Adobe Flash CS5 merely being an authoring tool for web animations and interactions. The end technology is largely irrelevant as long as most devices (mobile or otherwise) can access it.<p>Adobe as an IDE only in the future?

Wouldn't SVG be a much more natural target for Flash than &#60;canvas&#62; is? What is the benefit of &#60;canvas&#62; over SVG?<p>It seems like it would be easier to do effective hardware acceleration for SVG than it would be to do the same for &#60;canvas&#62;.

This is great. Now maybe if people can get as upset about Microsoft not better supporting HTML5, in particular the canvas tag.<p><a href="http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/internet-explorer-9-shows-up-faster-but-still-lacking/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/03/internet-explorer-9-shows-u...</a><p>IE9 is a big improvement for Microsoft. However, if they included more support for HTML5, developers could get "all their wood behind one arrow."

Did you notice that the demo was basically an animated banner ad? Think about what this means for ad-blockers. The nicest thing about Flash is that you can install Flashblock/Click2Flash and most animated advertising goes away. If Flash animated advertising turns into &#60;canvas&#62; animated advertising, how will we block it effectively? For many sites, disabling Javascript isn't a realistic option because they also use Javascript for useful functionality.<p>The Flash CS5 IDE might generate easily-blockable HTML5 animations, but I expect that lots of tools will come out soon that will make it nearly impossible to automatically differentiate advertising from other content on the page.<p>Who knows, this could be the beginning of the success of the "pay to get an ad-free experience" business model.

Now this is exciting. We've been pining away for a while that there are no good authoring tools for canvas as good as the flash tools. Hopefully this just makes that problem disappear.

It looks to me like this only exports animation, which I can certainly see how it might be useful, but isn't really that exciting. The menu they ran the export from is all JSFL scripts (a way of automating operations in the Flash IDE to a certain extent) so they're probably just analysing the timeline and exporting the shape and animation data as JS.<p>I don't expect to see any kind of Actionscript combined export any time soon though, performance is too much of a hurdle in the near future.

I will reserve judgement until I see the HTML5 output, as generated code has a track record of being either a) unmaintainable, unmodifiable or b) doesn't work very well.

Precisely this should have been Adobe's response to the lack of Flash plugin on some devices. Instead of all the FUD-ing, blaming, whining, and even insulting that has been going on recently, Adobe should have said in the very beginning - we are working on a better mobile version of the Flash plugin and wherever it is not available, but there is HTML5 support, you can use our authoring tools to do so-and-so.

It's not inconceivable that Adobe would then have motivation to contribute to existing open source renderers, so that the exported flash animations run faster. This would be a win/win situation for everyone! Or are my dreams too utopian?

What about Flex apps? Can those be exported to HTML5 too?