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Essay on The Disappearance of Flash Websites

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If you need a website that "goes big" visually alongside complex interactions and delivers a rich experience to a vast range of browsers, Flash is the only way to go. Right?

Nope.

With the widespread adoption and advancements in both newer browsers and JavaScript Libraries, using Flash (or any other plug-in technology) makes little sense for MOST situations but can have its place on the web, given considerations for progressively enhanced content.

In the current landscape of technology and accessibility to the Internet through net-enabled devices like picture frames, netbooks, cell phones, and televisions, the benefits of using Web Standards are outweighing the benefits of using Flash, especially when you're delivering content to …show more content…

"HTML5 vs. Flash" is the wrong discussion. "Accessible rich media" is the right one - Jeffrey Zeldman (via twitter)

In the end, we're all just trying to create sites that can be accessed and used, no matter what tools we use to deliver them.
Healthy competition
In the early days of the web, Flash was pretty much the only way to deliver a rich experience across different browsers and platforms. CSS and JavaScript were very inconsistently supported between browsers and relying on them was hardly worth the trouble.

Flash saw great success early on and pushed forward at an accelerated speed - the small app that mainly made animations quickly became a very worthy development environment in its own right. Developers and designers alike made a choice to concentrate their efforts in that arena, often segregating themselves from the open web and backing the proprietary technology. Flash sites took over and dominated the web, and Web Standards had a hard time creating the experiences that users were starting to expect.

Web Standards may have once fallen behind, but they continued to be pushed forward with the help of the practitioners and those willing to embrace the idea of an open web.
The benefits of Web Standards and why they are slowly taking over
Users expect rich experiences and, in lots of cases, those great experiences are now being

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