sho.gun

Not sure why there's so much flash hate going on here, I think flash is simply a tool that can be used by both designers and developers. A tool can be misused, and I think that your problems regarding flash being slow and buggy lies not within the platform itself but rather on whoever did the sloppy coding. With a 98% install base, you'd be hard pressed to find an easier and more widely available platform with the same capabilities to code against.

The flash plugin is available for all major browsers and so far everything has been backwards compatible, even when they switched to AS3. Regardless, it's trivial to do a flash version check.

Regarding the bandwidth issue, it's 2008. Most of us are no longer using AOL dial up and we can spare the extra 50k of download time if it brings a richer user experience. I'd be interested in seeing the file size differences between flash swfs and some of the implementations using ajax frameworks that are widely in use today.

I've been an actionscript developer for a few years and even to this day I'm still impressed by how much flash has expanded. Keep in mind it used to be a simple animation program.

That being said, it's very important to know your target audience and the purpose of your site. If it's a reference site, you should avoid flash and stick to ye olde html.

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