code_grey, I’m curious, do you have a particular example in mind when you think of a “good” page that uses Flash for navigation? I can’t think of any.
Also, how do you deal with Flash’s usability issues such as the inability to right-click, breaking the back/forward buttons, breaking bookmarks and the sending of links, breaking history and visited link colors, breaking the ability to open things in new tabs, ranking poorly in search engines, printing and text reformatting, screen resolution on netbooks, typically longer loading times, slower computers, outdated plugin versions on kiosked/poorly-managed systems, or the copy & paste issue mentioned above?
I would hope that businesses, even small ones, have enough sense to not piss off their customers unnecessarily.
And where did you get the idea that Flash is cheaper or easier?
It’s not. Really it isn’t. Flash is nice for animations/video/audio and sucks for anything “functional”. And the real alternative to flash for the far majority of use cases isn’t AJAX, it’s plain HTML with maybe a little bit of JavaScript.
Absolute positioning/sizing is an astonishingly stupid idea if your application has to work on multiple screen sizes. And that’s assuming flash will work at all on the device. On my Android phone, most flash stuff is barely usable, and on the iPhone/iPad it just won’t work at all. At the same time, a basic HTML interface will work on many phones, even some that aren’t even smart phones.
good point, thanks. Many of these problems could be resolved with a hypothetical appropriate framework, but admittedly it would be kinda lame. Kinda like reimplementing a chunk of the browser in the “quick n dirty as3 client app framework”. Nothing too hard, maybe, but then the users would need to get the hang of it as well.
I agree with the point mentioned upthread by ultrafilter that web app will be important only if it is a major aspect of the functionality. E.g. in a dating site or in various applications isomorphic to the dating site (such as eLance.com). Or let’s say a social network site.
I guess expanding on the “framework” bit and echoing what was already said about web analytics etc, I should note that there are many components and embeddable 3rd party services for html websites and few for flash apps. So that makes development of web apps strategically more sensible than web apps. And, it also may make it sensible to build clones of some of these services and components in flash and sell them to people who may be working in flash regardless.