You think it’s better to prevent ads by preventing EVERYONE from using such a technology? That’s like making “Used Car Salesman” an illegal job just because some of them suck and are offensive about the way they do business. To me, developers/designers/organizations must use the same discretion or risk losing customers and traffic. I flat out stopped using MySpace because I find the whole experience offensive to my ideas of pleasant browsing.

For every problem with Flash there is a solution (for example, document/search integration, history integration, load balancing, etc.) and for every advantage of Flash there is some form of alternative. Where a project lands in many cases has to do what is feasible to develop and support. For example, it is possible to develop Flash code that uses the XHTML document it resides on as its content model and therefore integrates well with search and meta context, and it is possible to capture and integrate with the browser history much as one would with an AJAX site. But doing these things out of the box is not very well supported by Adobe, and their Flex framework is a tangled and unpleasing mess. And it is possible to employ subtle nuances, temporal behaviors, etc. to a user interface via JavaScript, but doing so requires a lot more cross-platform testing, quirks and difficult choices about which spaghetti of JS libraries to use and how to apply them.

Stigma about technologies is silly. People, namely developers, always divide technologies into camps but in the end what will be remembered is the result. The most poetic application of a technology is when its limitations are circumvented but nobody really notices.

I’d love for you to post some case studies so we can really understand your beef with flash… or maybe you don’t really have a beef with flash and this is all just a salacious front to scandalize your readers…

here are some awesome sites that use flash, why don’t you give some examples of why you hate them?:
the-echoproject.com
http://edwardthomasco.com/
http://www.fifastreet3.com/flash/wk/player.asp

i think its important to note that reading/writing are popular uses of the web, but there’s a lot of multimedia potential yet untapped, and this is where i see Flash’s real potential strength to be, moving fwd. particularly now, as people are realizing that their computers are just big screens and the web is just a place to get any sort of media, it feels like we are almost ready to utilize the web’s potential to house media that is more of an EXPERIENCE (10 foot passive viewing, using remote control for interactivity). i’m thinking of customizable video viewing and playlisting apps, or news visualizations such as digg’s (with additional functionality of being able to ‘watch the news’ articles that catch your interest in the visualization). a lot of gorgeous flash animation is wasted on a web audience that is sitting at their computers in work mode. they’re in a hurry, and overwhelmed by the amount of hyperlinks in this crazy data universe. get them on the couch, and Flash becomes appropriate. they’ll have the time and the mind to enjoy the FLASHy show.

The problem with international keyboard and wmode is a Firefox plugin implementation problem that the Flash community have reported since a long time to Mozilla. I remember that the answer was they will try to do something but the problem was a really hard and long work to solve.

Tek’s last blog post..Et si ton voisin était développeur Flex ?

Ewan Marshall’s last blog post..Eeek

I read the posts from the other day and almost commented to refute 98% of the gripes as nothing more than developer remiss; but I’ve learned I’d rather be happy than right these days. Another lesson learned is I have grown to embrace criticism rather than fight it. So this thread helped me - thanks for that and for the .50 donation.

I’d rather focus on the differences between Flash/Flex and Java or .net applications than Flash and the browser - since it seems most of these comments are based on the browser experience alone. When it comes to a robust RIA in a browser or otherwise, I need a reason NOT to use Flash. We just waited TEN YEARS for an update to html. So, yes browsers got a bit more advanced, but they’ve done this by hacking their way around ancient standards and making 3rd-party plug-ins more restricted instead of embracing them and the meta data that has been in them for years. For eg. right around the time Firefox introduced ’session restore’, is about the same time I suddenly had a need to use session restore…now about 10 times a day! This is usually due to having too much ajax going on at once.

The separation from the browser is for sure the number one issue when it comes to using Flash for anything heavy on information, and unlike most other drawbacks in many cases it simply cannot be overcome by the developer.

As for including more video technologies and native 3D I think the main reasoning for not doing that has been that they want to keep the size or the plug-in installer down. For native 3d they do have shockwave, but one of the reasons Flash became a lot more widespread was the small filesize of the installer.
How many people would use Theora encoding and how much would it add to the size of the installer? I’m not sure it would be a worthwhile move myself.
Regarding #3 I don’t see that as a problem is you keep content separate from the presentation which is the way to go regardless of if you only have one type of presentation technology or go for several including Flash.

But speaking about keeping filesizes down they sure haven’t paid too much attention to that with Flex, nor the built in components that come with Flash.
Whenever possible I stay away from Flex and the Adobe components to ensure lean files.

Leo’s last blog post..Dreamspell calculator