Yes, they will. It's a big "when" though.

I work with Flash and I don't think it's buggy or bloated - that's overblown. It's not perfect, but it's definitely much better than people paint it to be (specially people who don't work with it).

In the same vein, HTML5/canvas is unreliable both in terms of performance, adoption, and consistency among different environments. People like to think of "standards", but when it requires as much hacks as any other 'standard' work nowadays do, and when it's not even available in half the browsers out there, I wonder how can anyone think it's the golden goose people like to claim it is.

> I work with Flash and I don't think it's buggy or bloated - that's overblown.

Depends if you're using Windows or not. On Mac and Linux, the performance and reliability are pretty bad (compared to other modern software, anyway).

We are facing exactly the same thing with graphs, we're using a custom canvas based solution but we found out it just isn't up to the task anymore when we need them to display lots and lots of data. Browser lockups are a result because it is just that Javascript intensive.

We are looking at Flash solutions right now to solve that problem.

People (in general) started using CSS over table-based layouts way after it was pragmatically beneficial, because they didn't want to learn new stuff or were stuck in the old mindset (e.g. the design of Hacker News).

And all those people not using CSS layouts for non-pragmatic reasons actually held up progress because it stifled the market for tools (and skills and frameworks etc.) that would work in the new manner.

So good analogy, but I think it argues well for the opposite of what you intended.

I'd argue CSS took hold early: it was in an era where you needed a lot of hard-to-maintain hacks to get it to work in all browsers. Today as in the past, many people get CSS layouts just usable in IE 6, while they look as intended in standards-compliant browsers. If you want a site to look pixel-perfect in all browsers, it's still not pragmatic to use CSS rather than tables (or Flash). What's changed are the constraints: more people started using browsers that weren't IE 6, all the other browsers became more consistent with each other (or use the same rendering engine, Webkit), and clients have become more OK with websites looking different in different browsers as they've become more used to the way the web actually works.

But this will eventually boil down to a difference in opinion, and I agree with your point that it would be better for everyone if more people were quick to adopt technologies that are better in the long-run.

> Just like people started using CSS over table-based layouts when it was pragmatic,

And vice versa. There's a nice table-based layout on the Google front page still!

I don't know about the old Google home page but the current one I see only has one <table> and it's wrapping what I would consider to be tabular data.

I'm looking at google.ca (it redirects me there) and it has the blank space to the left of the search field as a <td>.

Look here: http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Do you consider that mass of table usage to be for tabular data?