> Not at first but unless a customer absolutely demands flash, I code a requirement in HTML5 and show something that is smoother and better supported and Hey, works on the iPad. So much easier for the initial demo to just hand a tablet to show how nice the site works...
Not sure if you're joking or not..
javascript animations aren't smooth - they're clunky and ugly everywhere I see them. A friend recently showed me http://beetle.de/full/ - made using HTML5 and JS. The idea of scrolling the website is pretty neat actually but the performance and overall experience is pretty bad. Javascript actually reminds me of Flash 5 or 6 with the default framerate set to 20.
And in terms of possibilities it's not far beyond that really. Despite what you're saying it isn't faster than flash either - the VM is slower, rendering is slower, canvas for 3d rendering is slower..
If you wanted to write an application to do some serious client-side computing you go with Java or Flash. But since Flash is just so much more convenient it's the tool of choice. Since mobile devices weren't the hottest thing as they are not nobody optimized flash for low-powered devices. Hell, nobody optimized at all - there was plenty of CPU cycles to burn on desktops. You can make flash work fine for mobile devices - AIR is the practical implementation - however you need skilled developers (and only in the past 4 years or so have those risen to prominence among Flash users) and focus - actually design with those devices in mind.
Flash is buggy, true, but so is HTML5+JS. They're buggy in different ways - with Flash development is a breeze - the application always runs the same everywhere. No need to detect different user agents and serve workarounds for broken CSS implementations, no juggling of tags that one browser supports and the other doesn't. Embedding fonts, animations, importing various assets and creating a small self-enclosed application is faster and easier than it is in JS+HTML5, which is why I'm kind of reluctant to go back to that mess called JS (my last serious HTML development days were in 2005).
It must be said that about 80% of problems with flash stem from badly coded applications. Memory usage, lockups, crashes, low framerate, bad design ect ect. As a webdev you should know serious flash websites don't actually embed the content but load it dynamically - which means adding a text-only version for crawlers is trivial. As is deeplinking, support for back/forward buttons - but all of that came pretty late in Flash's lifecycle, unfortunately much later than it became technically possible.
For the record I'm a flash developer in Poland. Haven't seen anyone asking about iPad compatibility.