Adobe Labs has released a technology preview of Wallaby, an experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool. For now it's aimed at WebKit-based browsers, in particular Safari and Chrome.

However, Wallaby currently only converts typical banner ads to HTML5 and lacks an ActionScript conversion, which is used to program inside Flash and to create Flex applications.

According to the online Wallaby documentation,

The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5. Wallaby does a good job of converting graphical content along with complex, timeline-based animation to HTML5 in a form that can be viewed with browsers using a WebKit rendering engine. Supported WebKit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod).

Wallaby's design goal was not to produce final-form HTML ready for deployment to web pages. Instead it focuses on converting the rich animated graphical content into a form that can easily be imported into other web pages in development with web page design tools like Dreamweaver.

The release notes details several Webkit bugs and there is also a table showing which Flash features are supported.

The verdict after noting that video and sound, 3D transforms, inverse kinematics,scale 9 graphics and filters, along with ActionScript are unsupported has to be that Wallaby is not going to be setting the world alight just yet. 

There is also the small question of why Adobe would want to create a Flash to HTML5 converter? A simplistic view would say that it is just a way of getting onto iOS platforms - but why bother if you have to convert to HTML5 to do it? After all, if you give a programmer a tool that converts to HTML5 and HTML5 runs everywhere but Flex/Flash doesn't, you may just be highlighting that perhaps moving to HTML5 is a better way to do things.

However, until Wallaby manages to actually convert some ActionScript to HTML5 the issue isn't a real one.

More Information:

Wallaby from Adobe Labs