A Very Very Brief History of Flash and the Open Web
Not actually very brief, but more balanced than most. (Definitely more balanced than this site, but that’s a given.)
One thing, though:
Without a doubt Flash-sites have taken some bizarre turns over the years. Cursor trailers, excessive animations, “skip intro” cartoons that were more skip than intro - these types of things were all as annoying as everyone says. But I submit that this is what innovation looks like sometimes, especially in the early phases. It’s messy and confusing and quite often heads in horribly wrong directions. Like the evolution of anything sufficiently complex it involves a lot of failed mutations. The same platform that brought us skip-intro also brought drag-and-drop, animation, and general rich experience to the web long before it was possible anywhere else.
Thing is, though, that I don’t feel like we’ve gotten out of the early phases in some parts of the web. Extending the writer’s analogy, I think some people have gone in wrong directions, never quite corrected their courses, and now only know of this one way to go. It’s a pity, and I hope HTML5 doesn’t go down the same path.
