Bob Dove asked:
Will flash be the death of the internet? [...]
No, but it will be the death of many companies' attempts at using the internet. Everyone has been told for years that accessibility matters (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ first published 1999 with a couple of years of drafting before that), but it's only today that a multitude of non-PC access devices and mass use of the web are driving the issue home.
<span class="rant"> The trouble is, how do you convince the sponsors that the problem is "our use of Flash sucks" rather than "the web sucks"? You can show them sector trends or competitor case studies, but there's always some other difference available. People will refuse to believe and there's more than enough web developer cowboys willing to charge more and produce less accessible sites - I know because I've been seeing this many many times in Norfolk since starting out again in 2003. Too many purchasers are like little children let loose in mummy's make up: they want to plaster on the slap because then they'll feel like something's different. Unfortunately, it's that they look damned ugly. </span>
This has been happening long enough that now I'm doing fairly good business going along with good free software tools (tidy, sed, sitecopy, fuse and so on), removing some of that excess cosmetic and adding really useful things (like phplist, osCommerce, NIMKS and so on) to their sites. Sadly, I'm often hampered by customers not demanding the basics (like READMEs, Changelogs and SSL private keys) from cowboy developers, so I'm probably going to start a series of 'buyer's guides' on one of my sites about that soon. Or has someone more authoritative done it already?
Regards,