[Sigia-l] Flash 99% bad, or is it? (was Nielsen: It's the end!)

[Louise Hewitt]

> Timothy Karsjens

> I agree with him on Flash being 99% bad.  It is.  I won't use it for anything remotely critical to any functionality. Then again, I feel the same way about Javascript and DHTML.  I can make pretty complex shockwave movies (advanced flash), write DHTML to tap the powers of the DOM, and write a javascript bit to auto populate a form field based on a different form field, but that does not mean I will.
>

Hi Timothy,

I've recently been forced to revise my opinion of Flash from it being
99% bad to somewhere around 65%.

Look: I'm far from being an expert and have no coding clue, but am
married to a man who is, and it seems that FLEX is moving Flash toward
being more of an applications based tool (and not just building crazy
zippo buttons). It's already possible to 'mimic' applications with
Flash, but FLEX seems to make this smoother.

[Listeria: please don't jump on me, this is third-hand info I don't
understand but thought it was worth a mention.]

Anyhoo. Could the future of Flash possibly be more stable than that of
HTML? Let's face it, everything HTMLy since the dawn of the internet
has been a hack, including shoving javascript in it and building crazy
CSS to create curvy lines. Perhaps new format, being utilised in a
purer form, is the way forward?

A realistic vision of the future would seem to want a single app to
manage all input/output - the input being XML or the like data streams
and the output being phonecalls, video and images, music and sound and
text etc. Macromedia seem to be taking this on board with their vision
for flash.

If my man's got it right, and I'm not sure he has, at least FLEX
stores is basic data in a .txt doc even if this still has to be
reinterpretted as a .swf before it can be used. It's no solution to
the accessibility problem, but it is a step in the right direction.
I'd like to think that a bit of text for browsers and search engines
could at least be inserted in the file?

Does anyone know more about this topic? I could do with more 'facts'
for my monthly nerd discussions with my husband.

Ta,

Lou.