I been saying this throughout the thread, so pardon my (re)redundancy, but I really think Adobe's wisest move at this juncture would be to create authoring tools as great as the Flash authoring environment and Flex IDE for HTML5 (SVG + Canvas, etc) production.

And hey - remember <blink> and ridiculously large paychecks?- good times... ;-)

No mental gymnastics here: just happy to have a likely "win" for HTML5 and web standards in general. If Adobe were smart, they'd stop divert money from Flash, and focus on building out great Flash-like authoring tools that put out HTML5 content.

Anyone who claims differently is a deluded apologist Apple fanboy.

Or appreciates standards, amigo. Relax.

They're (finally) meant to be working on this... except I don't see it as a useful technology any more, now that Canvas and the rest are available. My take is that if Adobe were smart, they'd spend their resources on creating a Flash-like authoring environment for producing HTML5 content.

How exactly is this a misstep? Are we talking from a market success perspective, or from a Flash developers' perspective?

I'm a web professional of 13 years experience... and it's my professional opinion that websites ought to be built with open standards and web technologies ;)

On the UX tip, it's certainly possible to design and implement Flash content that doesn't rely on hover states, but the story's main point is that a great number of existing websites would have to be rewritten to do so... the thing is, while you're rewriting, you may as well just go standards.

I presently work at a major media company in NYC that has websites that use plenty of Flash (including a number of children's sites that are WAY flash heavy); my team produces both HTML and Flash-based sites. And, being that I'd get paid either way (forgive me for raising that point, but it does seem like your viewpoint is likely to suffer from no small amount bias, since your livelihood is presently tied to Flash development), I'd still always recommend going HTML.

That said, Flash does offer a great "fallback" solution for rendering SVG, Canvas content, and audio / video media in browsers that don't yet support HTML 5 :)

Doesn't mean that this particular point is without (strong) merit, amigo.

Who ever said there needs to be just one reason? Your proposed reason is an excellent one (from the business perspective), no doubt, but banning Flash is just a Great Idea for a metric ton of reasons ;)

Or, just adopt progressive enhancement as a implementational methodology :) websites can certainly leverage hover state interactions to provide "additional awesome," but should be fully accessible in cases where hover is not possible... including, say, the Lynx browser or audio interfaces for the hearing-impaired.

You may have already seen the comment I'm about to link to, but just in case not, here's the main point: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1558048&cid=31219426

He's talking about existing sites. Sure, one could rewrite existing sites so that there is no reliance on hovers, but at that point you really ought to be considering web standards.

There are plenty of reasons to keep Flash of those devices, but let's keep those aside for the moment; this particular point is simply more of a wake-up call to those who are lamenting its absence.

You're also talking to a fella that has Flashblock installed on all his browsers :)

But back to the particular point made in this post: ask yourself honestly... would the average consumer be more annoyed that Flash doesn't show up on the page at all, or that it does but that you can't interact with the bloody thing?

I dunno how much web work you've done, but I've been a (backend) web developer for thirteen years (yikes!) and this would be a huge issue for the majority of sites that I've worked on over those years.

And, frankly, if people have to reword their sites if they're interested in engaging the iP* audience, I'm beyond pleased that there's a whole swathe of folks that would be coerced into developing against open web standards, coz let's face it: unless you're a nerd like many of us on slashdot, you don't give a rat's ass about these concerns unless there's implications for your bottom line.

This finally provides a pragmatic reason for business owners and content publishers to get on the open standards bandwagon.

Well that's the fabulous part, isn't it? The individual ingredients are all out there... I mean, who can't get water, corn syrup, and the rest that's in coke? Moving away from crap like Coke and McDonald's, even the most exquisite pasta dishes start with eggs, flour, semolina, and a pinch of salt.

And that's UNIX's slot in the picture — the perfect base upon which to build towards excellence.

I would remind you that hardware is Apple's product; the software is just the "secret sauce" that pulls it all together.

McDonald's doesn't share what's in the Big Mac's sauce, Coca Cola doesn't share the recipe for Coke.

Besides, you can install Linux or Windows on your machine, if you so desire. I just don't think it's very fair to cry "foul" that they're not just giving away their secret sauce ('cause that worked so well for Sun...)

Aw, come on mr. coward – are you attempting to comparing sales volume of Mac-only era iPods against that of dual-platform iPods?

If you were to take the sales figures from this era as a percentage of the modern-day, you'd get a fraction so close to zero that statisticians relish describing as a "rounding error".

Your point attempts to account for historical knowledge, but dismisses pragmatic rationality.