Serge has a great post on Adobe and the open web. I don’t think Adobe gets enough credit for contributing to the open web. That takes a couple of approaches. One is, as Serge said, we participate in a lot of open source and open web initiatives. But we also spend a lot of time and money investing in the web and solving problems that we come across. Cross-domain support is a perfect example. It was a problem we saw coming long before Ajax and we created a solution in the Flash Player to support cross domain requests. I ran down some of the new APIs and changes between HTML5 and HTML4 according to Wikipedia and compared them to what we have in Flash and when we added it.
Not all of this is 100% accurate but it’s the best guess I have at 2:00 AM. I’ll update it as I get new info.
| HTML5 | Flash Version |
| Canvas Tag (2D Drawing and Animation) | FutureSplash (Flash Player 1) |
| Video/Audio Support | Flash 2 (Audio) Flash 6 (Video) |
| Offline Storage Database | No real offline storage in Flash Player, Adobe AIR added it in version 1 |
| Drag-and-drop | Supported in ActionScript 1(Flash Player 5) |
| Cross-Document Messaging | Cross-Domain support in Flash Player 7 | MIME type and protocol handler registration | I don’t think there is anything analogous to this in Flash. |
| New parsing rules | N/A |
| New elements such as progress, nav, time, etc | Largely covered with ActionScript 2 (Flash Player 7) |
| New form controls (dates, times, email, url) | Shipped with Flash authoring (Flash Player 3/4) |