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Flash has its place, an entire website is NOT it.

Enhancing a website? yes, multimedia rich content? yes, a plain dumb bulk material of a website? no

It's really strange how many of us have an intrinsic knee-jerk reaction against all-Flash websites. I know I have developed a bias about that over the years, but I can't really explain why. It seems like it just kinda developed by itself.

Cause we've used all-Flash websites, which causes a knee-jerk reaction during use, which becomes an inherant reflex.

No.

You can't explain the reaction? It's obvious - Flash-only websites are fundamentally unusable and frustrating.

I don't this its necessarily that Flash sites are fundamentally unusable. In fact, many of the attributes that people are responding positively to regarding Ajax sites have been available with Flash forever. I think the problem is more with execution than potential. Flash-only website developers overdo it, often by a huge margin.

When I saw the first Flex-powered sites emerging I was impressed. When Flash is used correctly, and with restraint, it can really add a lot to the functional interactivity of a site. At this point, however, it looks like Javascript is going to dominate.

Especially with Linux currently missing a Flash 8 plugin... And the FLash 7 plugin is slow and buggy... Roll on Flash 9... http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/

The author is confusing web sites and web applications. Sometimes the two are blended, but consider http://www.picnik.com/ which is an all Flash web application. It doesn't need to be indexed. It's tastefully done. It provides an in-browser experience that exceeds what could have been done with Ajax/HTML. In my mind picnik is a great example of a Rich Internet Application where Flex and Flash are best suited. If you are creating a very text centric web site like craigs list, then don't use Flash or Flex. If your site has both text centric and RIA characteristics then do what finance.google.com did and combine the two.

-James