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In a recent article by San Oliver on AppleInsider, Kevin Lynch, CEO of Adobe, said that Flash will continue to evolve. According to Lynch, “I know that there are certainly some who are working on HTML5 who are out to kill Flash…” Lynch added that he believes that both can co-exist. “He doesn’t see the push for HTML5 as a move to ‘kill’ Flash. If Flash stayed stagnant, it would certainly go away,” he said. “But it’s not going to stay stagnant. We’re going to keep innovating.”

As a designer and user of Flash and Dreamweaver, I think that as the web continues to move towards HTML 5 and other open standards, Flash will become more of an authoring program for multimedia content in HTML 5, Javascript, and the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Adobe is already doing that with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a front end for authoring HTML, CSS, and implementing Javascript functions. Flash could fulfill a similar function for SVG. However, Jacek Artymiak states in his 2002 article that SVG is a bandwidth hog compared to SWF. Is this still true in 2010? Are Steve Jobs jabs at Adobe Flash warranted? I don’t know. But if Kevin Lynch is true to his word, he’ll keep his finger on the pulse of the web community and allow Flash to evolve with the standards it embraces. In the meantime, the burden will be on the development community to design multiple versions of a project to use different technologies that will play on the myriad number of devices that are out there. That’s nothing new!!

I will be giving a presentation on bringing business partners into the classroom using PBCL (Problem-based Case Learning). The presentation, on 2/21/2010 at 12:00PM will be for the second meeting of the Nashville Instructional Design Users Group. Visit http://www.makinglearningreal.org for more information on PBCL and for connecting with it’s community of practice.

In a rare video that I came across on YouTube.com, Cheng Man Ching discusses the movement of Chi in the body. I had the pleasure of studying Tai Chi for about 12 years with a number of teachers. One teacher that I had several seminars with, Benjamin Lo, was a senior student of Cheng Man Ching.

Embedding media files into web pages have been a challenge for web designers for years. Different platforms default to different MIME types and use different helper applications to play the media. That is the reason why many have gone to using Flash. Flash is installed in 98% of machines that surf the internet. Embedding media in Flash is an easy way of creating one solution for the vast majority of visitors to your site and thereby ensuring a consistent user experience. Still, some prefer not to use Flash, or need multiple versions of a page to support mobile devices that do not support Flash – the iPhone for example.

Below are several resources that may clear things up. While the EMBED tag has been used for years, the W3C recommends the usage of the OBJECT tag.

• W3schools examples… http://www.w3schools.com/media/media_browsersounds.asp
• A List Apart article… http://www.alistapart.com/articles/byebyeembed. Note the date (2006)
• W3C recommendation… http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/objects.html#h-13.3