severe limitation.

I will make it no secret that I am not fond of Flash, and a lot has been written on the web fro many years about the subject. I will not comment on weather or not Flash is good or bad, but I will say that I believe there are current trends out there that signal an important change in the balance of power from designer to developers, and that signal a change of technology from Flash to Javascript.

The Acid3 browser test was released a couple of weeks ago and we’ve already have seen both Opera and Safari (Webkit) race to meet the test 100%. They both have accomplished that goal. Firefox is around 70% percent, but I have no doubt that they will be 100% compatible by the end of the year. This might not mean a lot to regular users, but for us developers it shows the great deal of commitment by the browser vendors on continuing to make the web a better place. We will not talk about IE, but the rest of the browsers have been getting getter and better in leaps and bounds during the past three years.

At the same time, we have been watching increased competition in the Javascript arena. Libraries like Prototype, Mootools and JQuery have seen whole communities grow around them and even friendly competition around implementing widgets and controls with each one of them. Sites like AjaxRain or Ajaxian continuously showcase the multitude of ajax controls that allow high degrees of interactivity on a website without sacrificing standards or browser compatibility, and without tying the developer into proprietary technology like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.

The time is here friends. We have reached the point where we can create highly dynamic sites, accessible to multiple browsers and highly attractive while promoting high re-usability and low maintenance. It is up to us developers to continue to promote a healthy, friendly, and competitive community around web standards so that our lives and those of our users will only increase in quality and richness of experience.