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Hey, you know, you do make some good points, and that was a good article. You're really astoundingly condescending and irritable, but I'm sure you're a smart person. At the end of the day, I'll say "my bad" for conflating Flash and ActionScript. They're not the same thing at all. I am a frequent user of Javascript both in the browser and servers, so I look fondly on most ECMAScript variants. The language is distinct from its runtime environment, which is where I find my gripes. I'll also admit that my past use of Flash is both dated and was closer to a "script kiddie" experience than what I do now, and while I doubt I was the worst developer ever, I was probably making bad decisions by both of our standards today. But therein lies, to me, the real problem with Flash. For the sake of constructive discussion, I will just concede all your points about the stability of the plugin -- since you did make good points about Apple's accusation, let's just grant the plugin is refined, secure, and stable. I think we can agree the easy publishing of the web enables bad developers all the time. They just write their shitty code, run it through bad or no QA, FTP it somewhere and boom, users are downloading and running it. This is bad enough with the HTML/CSS/JS stack. Flash exacerbates the problem by expanding the API handles available for shitty devs to put their shitty hands on. From the "user" point of view, where user is not either of us but someone who only wants technology to work for them, Flash comes with a lot more bad treatment than most things on the web. Dancing hamsters merely offend; bad Javascript can break a page load; but it takes a powerful plugin like Flash to really make your computer grind gears. And that gets to the crux of my argument -- CSS animations. When you start adding powerful features like that to a web technology, you know it will be abused because the web is full of shitty developers. Style sheets using these features are already crashing people's browsers (and I looked at the source for those animations -- I don't think these guys are even hacks at all). That shouldn't be happening. The world needs a stable stack of web technologies that minimize the damage bad developers can do. And this is just talking about poor code; you know the danger that a sweeping API poses in the hand of a black hat...big nod to ActiveX there. I know, the assertion that we should limit technology to account for the lowest common denominator sounds ridiculous, but do you really know of any way to stop bad developers from getting their code to run on user's devices? They seem to persist no matter what! Eh, I could go on. But no one is going to see this stuff at this point. I guess we'll see what the future holds, but I think bottom line...Flash had a good 10+ year run. It was a net benefit to the web. But there are things about it we ought not repeat, especially in other mature, dependable technologies, like CSS. |