Posted by Toby A Inkster on 08/01/07 10:44

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

> WRONG! You need a browser to view a website and a computer to go
> online and an Internet connection to visit a site, so really, out of
> all that, installing Flash is pretty much the EASIEST part of the
> equation and the one that requires the LEAST amount of effort.

WRONG! You don't need a computer to go online. Any vaguely recent mobile
phone has web access. One could argue that modern phones are actually
low-powered computers, but then you need to accept that there are a huge
number devices capable of connecting to the Internet but incapable of
running Flash.

While there are about 850 M people who access the Internet via traditional
computers, there are 750 M who use their phones. (Yes, there is an
overlap!) But guess which group is growing fastest? The cross-over is
expected to happen later this year or early next year. That is, in twelve
months, more people will access the Internet through their phones than
through traditional computers.

And there's room for a lot more growth. There are a lot of phones out
there which aren't now being used for Internet access, but will do as the
prices come down, data speeds go up, and it becomes more socially "normal".
There are 2.7 *BILLION* mobile phones out there! That's more than the
number of televisions and cars in the world *ADDED TOGETHER*!

In Western Europe, mobile phone per-capita penetration is at over 110%.
Hong Kong and Taiwan are nearing 150% per-capita penetration. Per-capita:
yes, that includes newborn babies and deaf old women.

Mobile phones do not support Flash. Yes, there are one or two edge cases:
Windows Mobile-based phones that support Flash Lite, but by and large,
mobile phones do not support Flash. You effectively need an Intel
processor running Windows, Mac OS or Linux. (There is also a Mac PowerPC
version of Flash, but performance on it sucks.)

We desktop users are becoming dinosaurs; old fuddy-duddies. In 2-3 years
time, a web page that requires a desktop computer to view will, to many,
seem as bizarre as a fast-food drive-through that requires its customers
to use a horse and cart.

Flash currently works on a small majority of Internet devices, but that
will soon become a large minority.

Pretty much anything that has an Internet connection supports XHTML 1.0
Strict and HTML 4.01 Strict, and that's not likely to change at any time
over the next 5-10 years.

Learning and using HTML, and server-side technologies that serve HTML to
clients is a valuable skill, and will stand you in good stead for the next
decade against a changing and unpredictable online landscape.

> Um, hello, the only time you would be using a screen reader is IF YOU
> WERE FUCKING BLIND! And if you were blind...why in the fuck would you
> have Flash enabled?

A blind person may share a computer with a fully sighted person.

> And everything else being Flash based. Really, the problem isn't with
> Flash, the problem is with those third party software developers who
> are simply lazy fucking antediluvian bastards. I mean if Google can
> setup their search engine to spider all the text content in a Flash
> file...yeah, anybody can do it, there is no excuse.

It doesn't *spider* Flash content. It *indexes* it. There's a key
difference: it cannot follow links embedded in Flash.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 41 days, 13:30.]

demiblog 0.2.2 Released
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/07/29/demiblog-0.2.2/

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