And Flash is far from dying; with it being installed on 98% of the computers connected to the Internet, it is more ubiquitous than Internet Explorer and even Microsoft Windows. HTML has not accomplished anything near what Flash has done, and will probably be always behind Flash. lol

I’ll pretend I didn’t read the other lies you wrote.

Actionscript is well documented, Flex is free and You don’t ultimately have to embed anything in an HTML page at all.

Oh and HTML5 nowhere near replicates the functionality of Flash – nowhere near. Again, you’re an idiot.

Also, how does your personal collection of SWF files on your hard drive, playable through the cross-platform VLC movie player, and transcodeable through any number of free, easy-to-use conversion programs (again, VLC), have anything to do with web standards development?

If you think Flash isn’t unstable, it’s because you’re probably running Windows. As for that 15s wait time, when Flash locks up on me (on a daily basis), it usually takes about 5 minutes before it informs me that there’s something wrong. I find that to be a bit of a chronological discrepancy if you ask me.

The write-once-deliver-anywhere paradigm only works if Flash is available on every platform and with concurrent versions guaranteed, which they simply aren’t. The only people who have control of that are the marketing guys at Adobe, who don’t see the profitability in maintaining such high standards.

Question: how does saying that Flash advertisements are just as bad as HTML advertisements support Flash’s case?

If Adobe really wants to make Flash a de facto standard, they should do exactly what they did with the PDF format – open it. They can still create the best development tools, just like they do with Photoshop. However, their business model is going to eventually force Flash to become a second-class citizen, as all proprietary formats thus far eventually do (RealPlayer comes to mind).

Java, by the way, is still alive and well after people just stopped supporting Microsoft’s proprietary VM.

Sorry to hear about your MP3 woes – I personally can’t remember the last time I had any difficulty playing an MP3 player in any browser. Maybe at some time during the 90′s? I’m sure you could find an Adobe product that could solve the problem for you. Or the free and widely used Audacity program, come to think of it. You might want to give it a shot.

Speaking of DOM hacking, I don’t watch any Flash-based advertising unless I want to. At the very least the advertisers could save themselves some money and write their ads in the ubiquitous HTML format, which is guaranteed to work in every single browser, period. This would be how Google made its fortune, in case you’re looking for a role model.

Not to mention that there are any number of high-profile companies (Google, for starters) whose single specialty is in delivering ready-made web advertisement to web developers. Flash doesn’t automatically deliver a roster of ready-made advertisers along with all of its other powerful features, does it?

If you’re going to make fun of HTML5, you might as well make fun of every version of HTML since the inception of the web. These arguments comparing Flash to HTML don’t really make very much sense, since no matter what version of Flash you use, you’re going to ultimately have to embed it in an HTML page for delivery, anyway.