I've always been against flash. To a certain point, I avoid flash-based sites. However, I've never been able to formulate clearly why. I know it's not a good solution for web. Intuitively, that is, based on countless encounters with both flash and non-flash websites. But I thought I needed an articulated explanation.

First of all, let me show you some of the examples of websites that do use flash and tell you what I like about them:

http://www.ibm.com/ is a beautiful piece of design. The home page, that is. It's clean, it gets the point accross nicely, and does so by using Flash. But rather than abusing features of flash, by moving stuff around mercilessly degrading my concentration. It shows a beautiful picture with well-written caption. And that's what I want. Content, not effects.

Another such case is at http://www.adobe.com/. Although I don't like the content, and there are sometimes irritating animations, it's better than if the whole page was swirling around.

I could probably think of a few more, but I think the IBM made a good point and there is no need for more examples.

Another example where flash is almost indispensable is, of course, YouTube. What other way of embeding a player into a page can you think of? Of course, the need for sharing video on-line is clearly about content, and also clearly outweighs any usability concern people might think of.

And now for the articulated explanation. It's a page on useit.com titled "Flash: 99% Bad". It's dated October 29, 2000, but it sounds quite today.

And now a DISCLAIMER: I don't use flash on my website nor do I create flash. Not professionally, not for fun. I am aware that it has come a long way since seven or eight years ago, but I still feel that flash cannot replace web technologies like X(H)ML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and the like, simply for the fact that those were made to be endlessly adaptable to new technological advances of the WWW.