Apple CEO Steve Jobs told WSJ staffers to ditch Flash and replace Flash-based content with other web standards—a move that’s doable, but not necessarily trivial.
I’m seldom in agreement with Apple’s philosophy of doing things. However, this is one bold move that I applaud and would want manufacturers to follow.
The trouble with Flash is that, like the less popular Java, it is essentially an external application that is being embedded in a web page. Having to depend on an external application is bad for security. It is my belief that executable code should never cross from the browser on to the desktop for no good reason. What’s more is that the use of Flash goes against one of the fundamentals of the web: accessibility. Content in Flash is encased in its own container and not text-searchable. If a website is designed entirely in Flash, there is no way for a search engine to index the content of it, neither is there a way to link to a specific page within that flash content. You can’t point a hyperlink to a particular frame of Flash content.
It’s time that we took up the axe against Flash and replace it with newer and web-friendlier technology, such as HTML5 and JavaScript. I’m glad that at least one company sees the problems behind Flash and is taking decisive action to move the world away from it.
All in all, proven arguments. And yes- they’re solved through workarounds and patching up.. but honestly that’s not the way to go. However, on the consumer side Flash has become such an embedded standard that it will be hard, and -above all- cost-prohibitive for anyone right now to venture into major JS/*HTML makeovers.
A more likely course would be the dumbing down of the platform.. making it as accessible as possible so that current day barriers simply vanish [read; extracted from the eye ;) ..]