[oso2k]

Flash succeeding is subjective. There were many who were hostile to Flash (and Java) for a long time. I actively disabled the Flash plugin except when necessary.

HTML not passing the criteria doesn't negate it from being the current leading technology. All it indicates is that there could be a technology that does more (most) of these things better. And, it sets a certain benchmark for the next technology to aspire to.

I think accepting input from anyone is a resiliency feature. Imagine if only Governments drove the Web? Or Multi-national Megacorps? Billionaires? Choice and freedom helps to democratize and enable usage by participants who are diadvantaged.

Content-neutrality is experiential. That is to say, gopher is well known to be more organizationally efficient at transimitting data than http. However, it was primarily aimed at text transmission and was very poor at supporting applications (like banking, commerce sites or email). These were huge boons to the current Web.

[xg15]

> Flash succeeding is subjective. There were many who were hostile to Flash (and Java) for a long time. I actively disabled the Flash plugin except when necessary.

I would define "succeeding" as "having overcome the chicken/egg problem, having a wide enough support as to be practically usable as infrastructure and enough content/use that it is relevant", regardless of how well liked a technology is.

E.g. I think JavaScript very clearly succeeded on the web, even though many people still turn it off and there are a lot of good reasons to. By that logic I think Flash had succeeded as well.