Maybe Flash is great inside, but whoever writes the instructions on how to download it or repair it (!) probably can’t find his bum with both hands.

Sure, Flash videos for Fox news work on our cross platform Macs and PCs in the office but only half the Pcs will play it on only just one version 2.54 but not 4.234….WHY? No one writes about this stuff for the end user. It’s as if I designed a house where half the doors didn’t swing right…and then expected home owners to consult Google on how to open the bathroom door. Basics lads, let’s get back to basics before we get too fancy

im a webdesigner and in some cases haved use flash on websites for links, but i also place a imaged linked underneith the flash object in case the user does not have flash installed.
burnleycreative.co.uk uses flash links but if you disable flash you can still navigate as normal.

You have just bumped into some webdesigner wanabies..

a true web designer builds for all

^^^
This is basically your argument.
Flash exists because it does things HTML/CSS/Java can’t. It’s beautiful because it can serve as a display point for a lot of different data, and give a different light to that data. If you just want a standard web page, you wouldn’t use flash. Flash offers you the opportunity to redefine for the viewer what the web is.

If accessibility is your concern, you can make flash accessible. You can use it sparingly if you think it’s cumbersome, but still want nice, anti-aliased vector animation. http://ecodazoo.com/ I know you’ll rationally hate it, but how can you condemn its use?

I released a video a while back in H.264 and had to put a FAQ up on the site so that people could manage to play it. Windows can’t play it by default, Quicktime Player doesn’t support a lot of settings in the spec, etc. You can always tell everyone “Use VLC”, but I dunno..

I also think a lot of the reason for YouTube taking off wasn’t just playing the videos, but letting people embed videos in their own pages, with a watermark that would bring you to the main site if you clicked it. That sort of thing would be harder to make work when you’re just launching an external video player.

BTW, the latest version of the flash player does support H.264 files in MP4 containers directly (even in Actionscript 2). I think Adobe realized that they were in a bit of a precarious situation going forward and decided to hedge their bets.

I believe there are some places for closed boxes on the web, and flash allows for that. The thing is, the majority of the web (95-99%) should be open, and not in flash. Some current uses for flash should not be there at all…, one of which being navigation. A good use for it would be complex games such as the ones at newgrounds.com/kongregate.com/and countless other flash game sites. Also, they are used on WWE.com to block the amount of people stealing their images.

In addition, the Flash site still fails the Google Translate test; despite the underlying HTML, it’s not possible to render that site in, say, French (unless you disable Flash or JavaScript). Doable, yes. Easy and useful, no. I also can’t use my context menu or command-click to open links in a new tab if I so desire, and all of the text on the Flash site is still not selectable. (In this case I can get some of it out of view-source, but that’s only because Ford went to the effort of making a pure HTML page for non-JavaScript user-agents or users browsing with Flash or JavaScript off.)

Again, why should I need to go through all the additional effort here? Flash has made perfectly usable HTML content into something I (yet again) have to put forth a lot of effort to get something out of for use or reuse.

Regarding performance, in this case, the Flash page is using 80% of my CPU just sitting there, whereas the HTML-only version (obtained by disabling JavaScript or plug-ins) uses about 4% just sitting there.

Finally, HTML does URLs, history, and selection of text by default; you have to expend some effort to break them. On the other hand, you’ve demonstrated that Flash can have unique URLs, but even that requires effort that apparently the vast majority of Flash developers are unwilling to expend.

After spending some time with the Ford site, it seems all the more like a poster child for something that would be, in the words of Dan above,

- easier to do in HTML/CSS
- simpler with no loss of functionality or appearance
- and [able to be] manipulated by text-to-voice or translation or other accessibility software

Moving on, you missed the point of the “black hole” argument. It’s not that Flash is not open source, it’s that content inside of Flash is trapped in a black hole. You can’t get anything useful out of a Flash applet without a lot of effort, at best.

Next, apparently I wasn’t clear enough that you can make all sorts of lovely looking buttons using the <button> element, the text label of which Google can translate (or, in the absolute worst case, I can extract the text from the source). This is certainly one of the easiest things to mess up in HTML, and using an image is indeed a very common way to go astray.

Finally, let’s all remember to keep the discussion civil and avoid personal attacks here. I’m not very tolerant of poor behavior, but in the interest of constructive discussion on this topic, I’ve allowed comments containing language I wouldn’t ordinarily approve.

Another is in-browser media players using flash (YouTube et al).

Those are just funny/useful, respectively.

But yeah, using Flash when the same feature would be…
- easier to do in HTML/CSS
- simpler with no loss of functionality or appearance
- and manipulated by text-to-voice or translation or other accessibility software
… is dumb.