Except that the file the Flash player plays (swf) is an open file format, there are other programs out there that can generate swf files. Two examples are Adobe Livemotion, and Corel Rave (not free, but alternatives to the Flash Authoring tool)
and i suppose if you wanted you could write your own player to play them in and make it open source.
1. Flash is only bandwidth hungry if the author makes it that way, a single page created properly in flash would probably be less heavy than the html (+ image) equivalent. Also version 6+ swf files are compressed by default. 2. This is a fair point. 3. Actually screen-readers can read Flash movies, and the order in which a flash movie is read can be controlled and objects hidden, again it's down to the author to make this happen. 4. Google can search through swf files (have you tried adding "filetype:swf"?), although it probably won't get very high in the rankings.
5. Flash has its own cookie style system that allows the flash player to store data, before this existed developers used javascript to create the cookie for flash, Macromedia were only trying to make it easier to developers. Maybe the flash SharedObject system could do with a bit of revising, for example following the browsers cookie settings or being off by default. However most browsers enable cookies by default, flash just follows suit.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the file the Flash player plays (swf) is an open file format, there are other programs out there that can generate swf files. Two examples are Adobe Livemotion, and Corel Rave (not free, but alternatives to the Flash Authoring tool) and i suppose if you wanted you could write your own player to play them in and make it open source.
1. Flash is only bandwidth hungry if the author makes it that way, a single page created properly in flash would probably be less heavy than the html (+ image) equivalent. Also version 6+ swf files are compressed by default.
2. This is a fair point.
3. Actually screen-readers can read Flash movies, and the order in which a flash movie is read can be controlled and objects hidden, again it's down to the author to make this happen.
4. Google can search through swf files (have you tried adding "filetype:swf"?), although it probably won't get very high in the rankings.
5. Flash has its own cookie style system that allows the flash player to store data, before this existed developers used javascript to create the cookie for flash, Macromedia were only trying to make it easier to developers. Maybe the flash SharedObject system could do with a bit of revising, for example following the browsers cookie settings or being off by default. However most browsers enable cookies by default, flash just follows suit.