Don't forget instant feedback to controls. You click, and something obviously happens RIGHT NOW. Not after the server gets back to you.
JavaScript can offer instant feedback. Though, sometimes the code could get mildly unwieldy, when writing it yourself. There are controls one could use, that takes care of all that plumbing, though.
As for any feedback that requires getting stuff from the network: Unless it is a peer-to-peer network, you STILL need to wait for the server to get back to you. (And, I doubt anyone's going to build a peer-to-peer Internet Forum, anytime soon.)
Fonts GUARANTEED to be the same on all platforms
Score one, relatively minor, point for Flash!
Launch games, show videos.
We could still embed Flash objects for those extra things. That is no excuse to render the WHOLE application in Flash.
Oh, and don't forget scalable vector smileys.
Oooo! Another point in Flash's favor!
Like I said, it is NOT impossible to build a forum with Flash. It is just not as easy or efficient as doing it with standard web site rendering.
Only if you went overboard on the animation.
Or anything else the client end would have to do.
Maybe, maybe not. I can 'zoom' Flash content to any level. Even fill the whole screen with one glyph of text. So much for 'near blind' complaints. There are also accessibility features built into Flash to do all the normal things and operate with screen readers.
And, yet, disabled users are still more prone to be frustrated with Flash-based sites than HTML based ones. And, I do speak with some of them, every now and then. I wonder why that is.
If you make a 'skinnable' app, anything at all can be customized. Reach right in with a WYSIWYG interface in Flash and change the color or the shape of things. As opposed to twiddling with scripting on a server generated web page.
If you use skins and CSS on a site, you don't need to twiddle with scripting.
What plug-ins? If it ain't got it, just hack it in. Any swf can download ANOTHER swf, and grab classes from that dynamically, or just display it in a box. Absolutely trivial.
There would still be a significant maintenance issue dealing with any new features that come out: New types of video players, new forms of User Profiles (Remember that "Zoints" thing? I did not like it. But, theoretically, it seems to be easier to plug something like that into a standard web site, than a Flash-based thing, if one was to do so.), etc.
Also, what about
on-the-fly changes? Edit a web page, (even in Notepad if necessary), and it is good to go. Need to edit a Flash app? That would require a recompile, some retesting, and redistribution to all the clients.
Web browsers themselves are susceptible to the same issues, including generating more 'modern' HTML than they can handle.
My point is that a web site is more likely to crash, the more things it has to load in. Flash plug ins are going to crash more often than HTML web sites by virtue of the extra steps and hoops the browser needs to jump through, to get it going.
If they're preventing Flash at work, they're probably filtering sites like this, too.
Naive assumption. Some places allow standard HTML (pure text, and maybe some picture formats), from almost any source, to stream in, but for plug-ins and downloads to be disabled, so there is practically no chance of attacks from buffer over-runs, or anything.
Only if the site upgrades to REQUIRE a new version of Flash.
Which happens more often than you think, on popular sites. But, this is probably a minor issue, anyway.
Much the same when the site as it is REQUIRES some level of 'CSS' support or frames and an old browser won't handle it, only you're 'REQUIRED' to upgrade the whole browser.
Wrong. CSS standards are set up so older browsers could gracefully degrade from the new standards. (although, sometimes not perfectly, I will admit.)
It's not necessarily more 'complex' than the hoops you end up jumping through to get the web page to render right in Internet Explorer (multiple versions) versus Mozilla/Firefox (multiple versions) versus Safari (multiple versions) versus Opera (multiple versions).
This is actually not as big an issue as you might think. There may be some tweaks one must do, to get a site looking EXACTLY the same, on all those browsers. But, most browsers will render 95% of everything 95% correctly, 95% of the time. And, with a few exceptions, that 5% is a trivial, superficial matter, anyway. (With the one big exception being that ugly IE6 div-tag margin thing that I would rather try to forget about! But, that's water under the bridge.)
And let's make one thing perfectly clear, I'm not saying it should be done, simply responding to someone who said it couldn't be done, or it would 'suck' based on completely whacked-out assumptions about how Flash works.
I think I can agree with that!
Wait...are you implying that my assumptions are whacked-out?
Oh, and start with Flash 10, and you could have a completely 3D UI.
Flash 10 is pretty nifty. But, that does not address what I was writing above.
