Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. Photo: Adobe

SAN FRANCISCO — Adobe’s CTO wants to make it clear that the public battle between HTML5 and Flash isn’t about technology, it’s about politics.

“The story is not about HTML5 vs. Flash,” Adobe’s Kevin Lynch says. “It’s about freedom of choice in the industry.”

Lynch says developers should be able to use whatever tools they want to create whatever experiences they want on the web.

“There are some who would like to wall off parts of the web and require you to get their approval to create something,” he says.

Lynch spoke Wednesday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo taking place here at Moscone West. The twice-per-year developer conference focuses on all things web, and though the audience is primarily made up of developers, the talks often turn to current events in the tech world.

Adobe has certainly been in the news quite a bit lately, with its Flash platform and Flash Player being derided by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has disallowed Flash on the iPad and the company’s other mobile devices, and has banned apps created in Flash from being sold in the company’s App Store by changing the wording of the developer’s agreement for its latest iPhone OS.

Lynch didn’t refer to Apple by name until prompted by Web 2.0 Expo program chair Brady Forrest, who was interviewing Lynch on stage.

“Are you referring to Apple and the iPhone,” Forrest asked.

Lynch shot back: “Are you reading between the lines?”

“Apple’s playing this strategy where they want to create a walled garden around what people use,” Lynch continued.

He turned to an analogy he’s used in the past: the development of railroads in the United States in the 1800s.

“Part of the competitive dynamic at that time was that people were using different gauge rails for each section of the route,” he says. If you wanted to move your freight on somebody else’s section of railroad, you had to unload everything and put it into different cars. The same cars couldn’t run on different sections of the rail.

“That wasn’t good for industry. The ‘gauge of rails’ today is writing code for particular operating systems.”

One of Jobs’ big arguments against Flash is that apps written for the iPhone and iPad using Adobe’s Flash development tools don’t work properly on Apple’s mobile platform. His company has gone as far as banning them, citing this shortcoming as the reason.

Lynch says it’s a myth that cross-platform code can’t retain the intricacies of a specific platform.

“You don’t lose expressiveness or fidelity by cross-compiling applications,” he says. “It’s disingenuous to say that cross-compiled code won’t be able to take full advantage of any particular device.”

“The technology issue Apple has with us is not that our tech doesn’t work, it’s that it does work. We don’t want to play a technology game when Apple is playing a legal game. We’re not going to play that game, we’re going to concentrate on everyone else.”

To that point, Lynch talked a little bit about the Open Screen Project, the Adobe-led initiative to get Flash software integrated into tablets and other mobile devices from various companies to take advantage of hardware acceleration and specific hardware features, like touchscreens, cameras and GPS sensors. Adobe has a booth at the expo where attendees can play with prototypes of different tablets running Flash.

Lynch also had some nice things to say about HTML5 and its many capabilities.

“HTML5 is the best thing that’s happened in browsers for a long time,” he says. “Innovation happening in the browser again.”

Lynch, who worked on the initial launch of Dreamweaver at Macromedia in the mid-’90s, took us back to what things were like back then.

“DHTML was supposed to take off and it didn’t. We went through a period of stagnation in HTML, which made room for Flash to grow.”

“We will keep making tools for people to create experiences in HTML5,” he says, referring to Dreamweaver and other products in Adobe’s Creative Suite.

As for Flash’s future: “We will continue to work on Flash, filling in holes as fast as we can and developing it at a much faster pace than we have previously,” he says.

Amid the current turmoil, Adobe released a new version of the Flash development app last month and is actively developing its next Flash Player.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of the entire 15-minute interview:

See Also:

• Who Needs Flash?
• 8 Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss at Web 2.0 Expo
• Flash Faces Down Threats on Adobe’s Big Day

Tomorrow’s web is being built by a vast community of programmers and designers spread around the globe. They’re all forging new paths on their own, but it’s when they find the occasion to get together and compare notes that the sparks really fly.

Such a gathering is happening this week in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo, a conference put on every six months or so by tech publisher O’Reilly.

Just like other developer conferences, there’s an expo floor and parties at night, but the meat of the event is the mix of talks, hands-on sessions, keynotes and presentations about all things web. There are sessions on browsers, Flash, HTML5, geolocation, JavaScript, advertising platforms, cloud computing and online communities.

It can all be a bit much, so here are our picks for the sessions you simply shouldn’t miss at the Web 2.0 Expo. Certainly, there will be others of great importance to you depending on your area of expertise (and you can view the full schedule here), but these are the sessions that we Webmonkeys are most looking forward to.

All sessions are taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco. The conference sessions start Tuesday and run through Thursday morning. Intensive educational tracks are taking place Monday, May 3. Follow coverage here on Webmonkey and on Twitter under the hashtag #w2e.

HTML5 vs. Flash: Webocalypse Now?

Tuesday, 10:00am, room 2001

Design guru and author Eric Meyer leads this discussion about the future of Flash on the HTML5-powered web. Don’t expect a Flash-bash session, though. It’s true that Flash has been taking a beating lately, but it still has a place in the modern, media-saturated web. Meyer will examine issues central to the Flash vs. HTML5 debate, including openness, security and performance.

A Conversation with Paul Buchheit

Tuesday, 4:10pm, Main Hall

This keynote interview will occur on the main stage, as Web 2.0 Expo program chair Sarah Milstein dishes the tough questions to Facebook’s Paul Buchheit. Now one of Facebook’s lead engineers, Buchheit originally arrived at the social networking giant when it acquired his start-up, FriendFeed (he was also one of the engineers behind Gmail at Google). Facebook has since incorporated many of FriendFeed’s innovations around real-time social publishing into its core product, the constantly-updating News Feed that scrolls down your Profile page. But that’s just the beginning of Buchheit’s story at Facebook. We can expect some discussion around the company’s new Open Graph platform it launched in April.

A Conversation with Kevin Lynch

Wednesday, 9:30am, Main Hall

On Wednesday morning, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch takes the hot seat. He’ll be answering questions about the future of Flash on the open web, on Apple and Android devices, and on developer’s desktops as a programming environment. Lynch often stays close to the Adobe script, but it’s likely that whatever he says will add fuel to the HTML5 vs Flash debate — already a heated topic among browser vendors, mobile device makers, and proponents of open web technologies. Web 2.0 Expo program chair Brady Forrest is the interviewer.

The Search Platform: Friend Or Vampire?

Wednesday, 10:15am, Main Hall

Where do you get your news? If you’re getting it from Google, content providers like Rupert Murdoch are gunning to shut down your favorite delivery system. There’s currently a lot of chatter about whether search providers have the right (via fair use) to reprint excerpts of the news articles they’re linking to, and most of the negative rhetoric is being voiced by news publishers. But on a searchable web governed by the link economy, there has to be a balance between linking and re-publishing for anyone to extract any value. Danny Sullivan of the Search Engine Land blog breaks down what it will take for search engines and publishers to get along.

What to Expect from Browsers in the Next Five Years

Wednesday, 11am, room 2006

This open discussion examines where the browser is headed next. No doubt, it will be smaller (fits in your pocket!) and more powerful. And it will probably handle your identity on social networking sites and play videos without plug-ins, too. Ajaxian editor Dion Almaer moderates the panel, and Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford (a JavaScript guru), Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, Opera’s Charles “chaals” McCathieNevile, and Microsoft’s Giorgio Sardo are the panelists.

The Innovative APIs Fueling Location on the Web

Wednesday, 3:40pm, room 2006

Former Webmonkey contributor Adam DuVander runs down all of the free tools available on the web for creating geodata-driven location-aware applications. Before you go, also check out Adam’s most recent project: Geomena, an open database of wi-fi access points you can use for geolocation.

State of the Internet Operating System

Thursday, 9:00am, Main Hall

Mr. Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly kicks off the final day of the conference with his keynote presentation on what he calls the “internet operating system,” the collection of technologies and concepts — hardware sensors, identity, mobile phones, location APIs, advertising, cloud-based processing, et cetera — that are shaping the future of computing. Tied to our desktops no longer we are, young Jedis.

Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

Thursday, 1:00pm, room 2001

This panel looks at the state of typography on the web, and as you may be able to guess from the title, these guys think things are looking up. Fonts aren’t as limited as they used to be, thanks to innovations in CSS, JavaScript and web services like Typekit, which dole out really nice-looking fonts across the web using a new licensing model. Jeff Veen of Typekit is the moderator, and panelists include FontShop’s Stephen Coles and JQuery’s Paul Irish. For a preview on this topic, check out the very first episode of The Big Web Show, which discusses web fonts and features Veen as a guest.

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