Let it be known that I'm a Flash hater (for the most part)

If you asked me 6 months ago what I thought about Flash, I would have said that it had some appropriateness in the online world as long as you used it as a layer of progressive enhancement on top of Web Standards.

I’ve pretty much changed my mind on this. Maybe I’m a little over dramatic but I think Flash is taking a dive pretty quickly.

In the full picture of things, the number of people that have bought or plan to buy the iPad and those who own an iPhone is pretty small compared to the number of people online, but that hasn’t stopped many major websites from ditching Flash in an attempt to cater to those users.

Let me just say that I used Flash exclusively for a long time and I couldn’t have imaged building a website without it – eventually I got wiser. I’m glad to see sites moving to Web Standards, even if it is motivated by the iPad – its a start.

Today, Smashing Magazine just put up an article I wrote – The gradual disappearance of Flash websites which is hopefully my first of a number of articles for them. To me, it’s nothing new or profound but hopefully puts the reasoning for avoiding Flash on websites in front of budding designers and developers.

Many people are saying that “Flash is Dead” but I disagree. Flash will live on in AIR applications and if it does eventually die, it won’t be because of Apple. Its death will be because of the designer/developer community moving on…