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Nate Posted…

I agreed with this article in many respects, but I think that flash offers a greatly reduced development time compaired to DHTML (except for perhaps DHTML gurus), and of course there are many things that are just not feasible in DHTML that are simple to achieve in Flash. I do think that this is an elegant answer to the concept of Flash “taking over the internet”, which is perhaps nothing more than a hasty bit of marketing excitement. A rebranding of DHTML technologies might be the answer to getting more folks interested in using it again. What would we (they) call it? VTGM–Very Tricky to Grasp Markup, ok now I’m just being silly.

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Alex Posted…

All in all I agree that this is just a reaction to the Macromedia marketing hype. As a webmaster who regularly develops in Flash and DHTML, this article was little too skewed.

Steve Champeon doesn’t seem to address a couple of key facts about Flash and DHTML. As nice as it is to claim that the standards are in place (“Developers no longer have to code for two different APIs.”), it isn’t true that they are followed properly. The workarounds required to cover different platform/browser combinations can pile up quickly, especially if you have to keep the *NIX varients in mind. For most business projects I still have to cover NN 4.X as much as I hate it.

I work for a company that produces quite a few graphs and maps daily which are displayed on line and I am looking forward to trying to use Flash to generate these items and provide the capabilities inherit in vector graphics including zooming, and panning in addition to providing options to change timespans and scale. So, to say that the multimedia aspects of Flash are useless unless“you’re in the online porn industry, or the Web multimedia authoring tools business” is rather foolish. It shows a lack of vision for what is a really good tool.

Does Flash require a plugin? Yes, then again that plugin has been included with almost every browser downloaded for the last seven years. The last statistic I saw (admittedly from Macromedia) listed a 97% browser inclusion ratio. So, the use of Flash does not require most users to download anything.

Okay, one final point and I will stop my rambling. He seems to believe that there are hard lines between designers and coders. Most places I have seen and worked, if you are dealing with front-end displays, the designers are producing a good bit of the code and the “programmers” are dealing with the back-end. When dealing with applications which require this separation, I do not see that DHTML is better than Flash which can pull in files just as DHTML can. But, it is easier for a programmer to deal with DHTML as it is a quick scripting language as opposed to Flash which has a learning curve. Personally, I find DHTML to be faster to develop with if I am doing simple sites in a short time.

So to summarize my rather verbose comments, DHTML and Flash are both very good tools which address many of the same needs. There are subtle differences and your background in design or coding probably have a serious impact on your preferences.

That’s just my $0.02

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Robert Posted…

The bottom line, from my perspective, is that it is still much more difficult to create rich Web application interfaces using DHTML while maintaining browser compatibility than doing so with Flash MX. I don’t think anyone doubts that it is possible to create rich UI’s for Web applications with DHTML. (Take a look at Oddpost if you haven’t.) At the same time, there are quite a few things that you can do with Flash pretty quickly and easily that just aren’ t possible with DHTML. When was the last time you wrote a DHTML interface that let the user interact with a Web application via their microphone?

I think it’s a shame that someone whom I respect as much as Mr. Champeon makes some points that just aren’t accurate in the article. Flash, for instance, works very well with XML, but Steve says something that would lead a reader to believe this is not the case at all. I think this article is more an attack on the marketing for Flash that an educated attack on the technology itself. I remain convinced that both sets of technologies have their place, and that the informed developer goes into projects not trying to map them to a particular technology set regardless of need but rather choosing a technology set based on the particular needs of the project.

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John Dowdell Posted…

I think Steve’s article is worth a read... DHTML is certainly worth a re-examination here in mid-2002. I’m not sure about the concept of “win”, though. More info here.