Beautiful websites are designed, not coded.
Websites look beautiful because they are designed. Flash wins hands down when it comes to designing. Flash has an entire ecosystem of tools built around it which enables designers to design beautiful websites. In addition, there are tens of thousands of Flash templates that are provided by companies, which allows designers to build a complete website from scratch in no time. This kind of tooling ecosystem is almost non-existent for HTML5. Though beautiful websites can be coded using HTML5, the amount of effort required to code the website is order of magnitude higher than the amount of the time it takes to design the same website using Flash.
Experience counts.
In most professional jobs, the amount of experience a person has on a particular field, has a huge bearing on the quality of work. Applying a similar logic to HTML5 and Flash, Flash has been around for many many years compared to that of HTML5. Flash has matured over the years, it has gone through various learning phases and has stabilized over time. On the contrary, HTML5 specification is just being written. It will take a lot more iterations before HTML5 matures and gets that stability that flash has.
Let there be leaders unite, before they seek followers.
HTML5 specification is still a work in progress. HTML5 implementation is only in its primitive stages. Even websites like Gmail and Google Docs, which strives to use HTML5 as much as possible, does not work with HTML5 alone in all browsers. Consider the folder upload functionality of Google Docs, In Google Chrome, it uses the HTML5 to allow drag and drop of a folder into Google Docs. But to achieve a similar functionality in Firefox, Google Docs has to rely on Flash. Hence, until the time all browsers start to have all the functionalities that HTML5 specification states, it is hard to expect website developers to move to HTML5.
We Live for the Society.
Until very recently, IE6, which was launched about a decade back was still the most used browser, and even now, Windows XP which was also released about a decade back, is one of the top operating systems in use. The Internet has quite a lot of people who resist change and it also quite a lot of people who don’t even understand what a browser is. So it is going to be a hard job to get all these users to move to the latest version of the web browsers to view our websites. Websites that are being designed need to cater to this population too. Until these people who are resistant to change, start adapting the latest versions of the browsers, we have a long journey ahead of us before HTML5 gets mainstream and replace flash. Talk to any software engineers, he/she uses the word coding every so often that it makes you feel as if you are worthless to use a computer. But does it really have to be so? When computers became usable by common man back in 1970’s/1980’s, computers were still in its complex ages. Doing every simple task would require a lot of typing and remembering a lot of complex stuff. Then came Windows 95, which brought in GUI and When it comes to computers the first thing that comes to mind is programs. Every thing in computers involves are lot of programming.