I've been noticing that there's a gap between web programmers and web designers. Naturally, web designers are more biased towards full flash sites, since it allows them a very good venue to vent their creativity and art, but for web programmers, they tend to shy away from flash due to its incompatibility with accessibility and usability requirements proposed by the W3C.

Anybody wanna discuss the usability issues regarding the use of flash on the internet? How many people are still in 56K era? How many more yet to install a flash plugin for their browsers? What are the concerns or limitations to proper usage of flash on a webpage? What kind of contents would it work best, and in what kind of context should the usage of flash be avoided totally?

Come, share your thoughts.

Allow me to steer the discussion into one area:

INTRO PAGES.

Yes, in the internet you see a lot of websites with flash intros. Anybody wants to give some thought about the practicality of these intros? For websites other than artwork sites, like communities, info portals, information zones, news websites, are these intro pages necessary? Or rather, in which context will these intro pages be useful?

In my opinion, the internet can be used for a few things:
- marketing
- information zone
- community
- commerce/service

Flash intros are only appropriate for marketing purposes only, like the websites for various upcoming movies, games, and stuff like that. The reasoning is that these visitors will only come to the website for a limited period of time, most probably max 2-3 visits, before the website becomes obselete. Maximum impact has to be imposed upon the visitor within that very limited window, and therefore flash is welcomed, even encouraged. For the other 3 usages, they are unnecessary.

What say you?

What do you guys think about the future prospect of flash? Will it replace HTML's presentation eventually?

One thing with flash is that firstly, it is not a standard endorsed by w3c. Heck in that sense, even AJAX would be better. This means that not every browser comes with the latest and greatest flash plugin, and you will periodically need to update it. As etsuko said, backward compatibility would be a nightmare to non-tech savvy users. Secondly, with each new iteration of flash there's bound to be new features added in, and these features does not have a roadmap. This means that the general public doesn't know what to expect from the newest flash version.

Will these two attributes hurt flash? With the wide variety of browsers, platforms and machines that we have today, what do you think?