I am a devoted standardista myself but tend to agree that moaning on about the existence of a technology is not the way to go about things - one should instead investigate how to make the technology more accessible to all and make others aware of the issues and solutions. This is the way of a true standards guru.
The problem with Flash isn’t the technology here - it is often the bad usage of it in my opinion. Some Flash sites may as well be done in HTML/CSS as all they have is a basic layout with a ‘funky navigation’ - where Flash becomes useful is its usage as elements in a HTML/CSS site - like this:

http://web.burza.hr/

The above site is using Flash - some sites abuse it.
Well said, PJ.

http://www.orange-project.com/ is a great example of accessible flash

Flash is making GREAT strides at being accessible to a wider audience. Still, some of that is reliant on the developer knowing how to take those steps.

I am glad that you cited examples of where Flash excels and cannot be replaced with JS/HTML (especially when you are comparing filesizes). I work for a book publisher. Recently we wanted to make two additions to our site, an area to listen to author interviews and an area to preview our audio books. My first look was to flash to create a small audio ‘container’ that would allow me to throw different files in for listening. This simply couldn’t be done with HTML/JS. In this specific instance (and I strive to make our site fully accessible - and continue to work to make improvements) - Flash was the best tool to get the job done, and, when I am finished with everything it will be accessible (as far as providing textual alternatives, etc).

I will say, however, that using youtube’s html as an example is like pointing to myspace for quality pages. We know its bad. Just because no one raises a fit about it (or because its inaccessible to some), doesn’t mean that its RIGHT. I am sure google will take the right steps to fix it ;) hehe.

Thanks for a great article.

I sure do believe that Flash will improve much, and I think we will see more nifty things like sIFR in the comming year - so no reason to block out Flash. Good read :)

I’d think that would be the other way around, myself… especially where usability and accessibility are concerned! ;-)

RE: Tor
You hit the nail on the head. So many designers never want to learn HTML, so they just play in the timeline in flash. To them, thats much easier - but they haven’t got the first clue about creating QUALITY flash for a website, and when/where to use the tool. They just use it for everything.

I had a local ‘developer’ show me some flash movies he made for a client. It took over 2 minutes to download, and when it finally arrived it was less than impressive. He told me ‘the client wanted everything in the flash, so it takes a while to load’ Apparently, he has never learned how to load external movies, how to use flash with JS/AS/XML to get the job done properly. Those movies could have loaded much faster and worked much better if he built them properly, but instead - the client suffers because he doesn’t even know how to use the tool he is working with - Flash. This is not Flash’s fault, but I think so many people are still ignorant as to HOW to use the tool, that it continues to get abused.

I think that Flash is part of the future, but only part.

Thanks for stopping by, mate. I too think that many Flash sites are inaccessible and the accessible ones are few and far between. But do you think that for the uses that PJ pointed out in the article (e.g. Video or audio playback) that there are ‘better’ alternatives to Flash? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Personally, I agree with PJ in that Flash isn’t the worst solution to some problems on the web - it’s just often misused.