Much has been said recently about the "death match" between Flash and JavaScript (which, come to think of it, must make Silverlight feel awfully lonely). As far as I'm concerned, we should all just get along; diversity is good. That said, I'm definitely a JavaScript guy.

It's wonderful how far JavaScript has come in recent years in terms of being able to run graphically rich experiences, but there's one crucial area that everyone seems to be ignoring: there are no artist-friendly tools for creating such experiences. One of Flash's major strengths has nothing to do with technology, per se: it's the fact that the Flash authoring environment originated as an animation studio for artists. Over the years, they've added all sorts of programmer-friendly features, but its heart and soul is still artistic creative expression.

On the other hand, JavaScript, for all its strengths, is still a programmers-only club. You can make amazing things with it, but only if you can sling the code. This locks out the very people who are going to elevate it to an art form. It's time for this to change. Someone needs to make an authoring environment for creating graphically rich, interactive, animated experiences that run in JavaScript.

That's a big task, especially if your goal is to end up with something as deep as the Flash authoring environment, but it needs to happen, and it's not going to get any easier the longer we wait. The good news is that, unlike the singular entity that is the Flash studio, these JavaScript tools can be distributed; different teams can work on different parts of the problem, integrating with common protocols that emerge. In fact, developing an open format for describing such creations would allow a variety of tools, written by any number of groups, to all interoperate.

So, what's a good chunk to bite off first? How about a simple, user-friendly web app for doing animations?

Labels: seeds