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HTML5 is considered to be one of the newest and most promising features of the internet today. It is bringing together media and interactive content to users in lieu of the much slower and less stable Flash format.

Apple has been backing HTML5 heavily and has been keen on making Flash obsolete. While they are a long way from being able to phase out the old format, they are certainly doing great by establishing the HTML5 format as the new platform that designers should use.

According to a recent report, YouTube Mobile is now running in HTML5. This makes the website accessible from the iPhone, iPod and iPad devices from Apple. The iOS can only support HTML5 and not Flash –which has rendered many website inaccessible to Apple users.

Despite this, Apple still stands behind many other mobile phone makers in terms of format compatibility. It is expected that by next year, most platforms would be able to support both Flash and HTML5, while Apple would only have access to HTML5. This is because Apple had chosen not to support Flash –which caused a major falling out between the Adobe and Apple.

In the meanwhile, Apple is still dealing with the issue regarding the iPhone 4’s antenna. The problem began when users noticed that the device had a tendency to lose signal power when the antenna on the side was touched. With the number of complaints regarding dropped calls increasing, it was only a matter of time before Apple sprung into action. However, their solution was something that users did not expect; Apple released a patch that corrected the signal meter to show a proper strength.

While the patch did help identify areas with weak receptions better, many felt that the patch was not a real solution and only served to divert the attention of users from the real hardware issue that they were complaining about.

Flash is never a necessity, web browser can run without any problems even if you do not download a Flash player.  There are hundreds and thousands of websites all over the world that are made entirely in HTML, Java and CSS.

Still, the lack of Flash will render many sites and features unavailable.

One of the biggest missing features is video playback. Most of the video content that users will find on the internet is encoded in Flash format. While Apple’s H.264 has an impressive video compression rate and the quality is much better than FLV, there are only a few website that actually use the new format. Even YouTube which is slowly re-encoding content to H.264, still uses FLV as the default file format for users.

So what does this all mean for the Apple iPad? This means that the touch screen tablet will work great as an eBook reader, an apps platform, a media playback device, but as a browser, it is crippled.

There is no denying the fact that lack of Flash is a disadvantage. Despite being future proofed for HTML5 and H.264, the iPad is a device of today, not tomorrow. Given a choice between a tablet that can run Flash, AIR, HTML5 and H.264 –like the new Android tablet previewed at the Web 2.0 Expo, and the Apple iPad which is only limited to the last two formats, the Google device is the better choice.

Apple is simply making sales because Google has yet to release their device.

To answer the main question: yes, Flash is needed. There is no two ways about it. Apple may be prepared for the future, but they certainly lack the features that are needed here and now; and it would be a bad assumption to think that the iPad will still be Apple’s main tablet by the time that Flash is no longer used.

Web developer and author Jonathan Snook is man with plenty of experience and know how; and he knows that Flash is far from the dead format that Apple is proclaiming it to be.

In his recent blog, he points out one of the key factors regarding Flash technology today:

“Flash’s downfall, however, has more to do with those wielding its power—the web developers and designers who misuse it—and less to do with the technology itself.”

Simply put, Flash has not only become the main media format for web games, apps and video, but it is also the medium of choice for many of those annoying things on the internet –mainly pop up ads and other recurring forms of annoying media content.

At the same time, Flash websites are being criticized as being touch unfriendly (as so Steve Jobs says), but the fact of the matter is that badly made sites are badly made, regardless if they are made in plain old HTML, Flash or HTML5. It has been shown several times that Flash content is something that works well with touch-based controls.

The bottom line here is that there is no reason to believe that Flash has finally met its end, or that browsers need only be compatible with HTML5. There is simply too much content online that uses the Flash format to think that it would be practical to browse the internet without being able to see a large chunk of online content.

Of course, Snook also knows that Flash is not the end all; even Adobe has announced that they will also be creating HTML5 development tools.

“Right now, HTML5 is slowly becoming a viable alternative to Flash for a greater variety of situations. However, Flash will continue to fill in the gaps for years to come because it continues to solve problems that web developers have and that can’t be solved with any other client-side technology.”

It will be a long time before the full transition from Flash to HTML5 actually happens. For now, the internet will evolve in its’ own way –without being dictated by Apple.