Why flash is better than HTML for presenting information online.

There are a lot of people dissing flash, and I wanted to quickly note a few reasons why Flash is actually a better way to present information and offer user interface/functionality than the old, outdated technology of HTML and its derivatives.

1. Flash gives the author control over how the content is loaded and displayed.  Would you want to watch a movie or read a book that had all the scenes or pages out of order? Had the pages come in varying sizes sometimes?  let you see the ending before the movie starts?

Perhaps you would, but the director of the film generally knows how you will get the most out of what they have to say, and needs to present the information in a certain order, with a certain context.  One of my favorite things about flash over HTML or even second life (www.secondlife.com) is that you can hide everything while it loads so the user doesnt end up seeing only the text with no images, or the layout all mangled like often happens with facebook.

2. Flash lets you discreetly send and receive server infomration without interrupting the user experience.  Say you need to fill in a form or something.  With HTML the entire page refreshes, so all your UI controls temporarily disappear then possibly reappear but in entirely different places.    Session management is entirely haphazard at best.

3. Flash provides the opportunity for extreme precision in placement and timing of information for the user.  With HTML, again placement using layers, alpha channels etc, is still difficult and clumsy compared to flash, and the result is either simple websites that are no significant improvement over what AOL looked like in 1995 (IE Facebook, google, ebay, CNN etc.),  and cannot use timing and animation to present information on more of an intelligent, as required basis.

Of course, there are lots of poorly built flash based sites just as there are poorly built sites in all technologies, but with Flash, there is the greatest potential for UI perfection, ease of use, and intuitiveness perhaps than any other technology in existence today.   HTML represents the lowest common denominator and if your website /platform is entirely based on HTML, it certainly says something about your respect for your message and your audience.

I realize the irony of using an HTML based blog to post these remarks, but I do feel that if Blogger offered a flash based system, they would have the potential for being far more elegant and intuitive for their audiences and would ultimately increase their readership due to the improvements over the potential losses of those who refuse to evolve and install flash players or other "new fangled technology"