Accessibility: When was the last time you saw a blind guy editing a photo on Picnik?

SEO: There isn’t really any content to search on a RIA.

Ease of content change: This isn’t an issue because there is no content. And I’d argue that making changes to an application are easier with Flex (Flash is a bit iffy).

Also, like some have said, Flash is clearly the only effective way to put video, sound, and other rich media on your website. So I believe you can’t compare Flash and Ajax, they are two completely different technologies that do two completely different things.

comment #4 by Ryan could sum up this article. It all depends on the developer responsible for the application.

If you break it down, the root goals to any web application should be accessibility to all users. That being said, it brings us back to our dilemma, do you have the right developer for the job at hand. After all we are merely discussing an application, in this case Flash. The application is only as strong as the developer behind it. The same can be said for any other programs or languages.

In conclusion they both have strengths and weaknesses when put to the same test. Bottom line, a flash-only and an AJAX only site wont fair too well on a standard cell phone browser.

Also visit http://www.sukip.com

I worked many years as a full time Flash developer, and as has been mentioned, we would have our CMS output XML files, from which Flash would extract most of the site’s content. Also worth noting is Flash remoting - the ability to communicate directly with the server via PHP etc.

Most Flash developers these days separate out a lot of their actionscript into external classes - plain text files that can be edited in any text editor. So it’s not strictly true that the Flash authoring tool is required to edit a Flash site.

I agree with your observation that full flash sites usually exist to support a product launch. They are commonly about marketing, and have a short life span. I have observed that of all the sites I visit with any regularity, not one of them is a Flash site. And I am a flash developer! One exception to the rule would be image intensive sites - I’m thinking specifically of portfolio sites for photographers and graphic designers, which are commonly built in Flash.

With the accessibility thing: most Flash developers couldn’t care less. Seriously, they don’t care.

With SEO, I agree Flash is woeful. Flash developers have to bend over backwards to try and expose their site content to search engines using all sorts of cunning tricks. If your content is stored in external XML files, you can parse the XML server-side and present it as HTML to search engines (that’s what I do).

@Shahrier: What’s a RIA?

AJAX, for all its present day de rigeur glory, isn’t exactly a rosy thing to maintain either. For a simple ‘behavior’ I have to import an entire protocol.js, just because I don’t know precisely where the functionality is coming from. The page size is big. And everything is useless if JS doesn’t work. It’s a lot more difficult to break the security glassbox of Flex. It’s a cinch to do it with JS in the wrong hands.

Your argument “Flash files are hard to update” because you need a special program is mildly amusing and hardly a reason as to why not to use it. As for it being hard to update, that really depends on how complicated it is to begin with. It can be as hard as coding in COBAL or editing a css file.

As for dynamic update of content, your argument is totally flawed. As a flash developer working with our technology team we haven’t had any problems integrating flash into the CMS’s of various clients. The flash just loads in a snipet of xml, or we consume a webservice or ultimately have information passed in through the object/embed tags. It isn’t rocket science and certainly not a strong argument for using Ajax.

As for Flash not being hip, again very much in the eye of the beholder.

I love Flickr (ajax site) and wouldn’t want it made in flash, at the same time i like http://www.nike.com and of course http://www.coca-cola.com