What is FLASH? Why do I keep getting messages about it on my iPad or iPhone?

Flash is a program that is sort of an add on to other programs that allows them to do many things. Flash is one of the reasons that the Internet has become so interactive. Flash is a program that is NOT included on the iPad or iPhone and so there are many things that will not work and often you will go to a website and get this error message:

Like me, you may have tried to click on the button that says "Download Free Flash Player" and found that it will not work either. Right now the only thing you can do is to give up and look at the page on a computer if you really need it.

The code that makes the website work is called HTML. Soon a new version of HTML will be used by everyone called HTML 5. It is not the standard yet, so all web sites are not using it. Flash was the way that web designers made their pages more interactive. When HTML 5 is the standard iPads and iPhones will be able to see everything that you see on your computer.  I have noticed that more and more sites are already using HTML 5 or doing something else so that their whole site works on the iPhone and iPad.

BONUS INFORMATION! (not necessary, but interesting... at least to me)

I also have problems when I try to use You Tube. In this blog, using my laptop I can embed video by going to You Tube, finding a video that I want, clicking on share and then copying the "EMBED"  code and putting it onto my blog. Here is an example of embed code and how it works: The code looks like this:

<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UuJwc_YVp98" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I copy it, go to the tab on my blog that says "EDIT HTML" and paste it in where I want it. The video looks like this:




On my iPhone or iPad if I try to do the same thing I do not get a choice to use embed code. Here is what I see:

So, this summer when I was writing my trip blog "http://world-everyday.blogspot.com" I could't only bring my iPad, but needed to find a friend with a computer so that I could embed the video.