"Jurassic Park Design" that is, designing what you 'Should' rather than what you 'Can'.

One of my pet peeves is Flash, I hate Flash. Wait maybe I should rephrase that I don’t hate Macromedia Flash; I hate what it does to clients and web designers the program it; it’s essentially an eye-candy crutch.

I’ve lost track of how many times a client has ask for a flash web site with items that move, fly out, rotate or blink really, really fast so that users convulse and collapse onto the floor foaming at the mouth (Ok maybe they don’t ask for that last one but it’s not far off). At this point, I’m going to (inside my head), retreat a bit – count to ten or until I can focus again without dreaming of stuffing those clients heads into a toilet.

Here are some of the reasons why you shouldn’t do flash for most sites:

    
• It will be seen as invasive advertising: users widely despise ads that cover content, ads that flash wildly and ads that chew broadband.
    
• Attention-deficit Web sites: Users have a special hatred of flashing icons and banners, because they draw the eye away from what is important and hinder their progress.
    
• Google won’t index the site, Google and all other search engines only read text.
    
• By sporting significantly smaller file sizes than equivalent GIF animations, Flash has brought back the splash screen, one of the most irritating of all web "experiences." Web users typically are looking for content, and presenting them with a content-free splash screen is a sure way to annoy, and give visitors a (good) reason to punt the site.
    
• Flash sites render useless the browser's Back button and address bar, and make bookmarking pages inside a Flash site impossible. Printing Flash pages from your browser doesn't work, nor does intra-page keyword searching. Finally, Flash sites eliminate HTML links' visited and unvisited colors, and that color-changing feature is the Web's single most important navigational cue.
    
• The user has no way of changing the text size used. Flash presentations are difficult for users with disabilities to see/read.

Don't get me wrong there is a time and a place for Flash

    
• With Flash you can deliver to your audience engaging applications and web interfaces such as training courses, tutorials and presentations.
    
• Flash uses vector graphics, which means that the graphics can be scaled to any size without losing clarity/quality.

But how can we replace it?

    
• For vector graphics, use SVG. But most of the time you shouldn't need vectors.
    
• For images, JPEG, GIF or PNG. I have seen people using Flash to make slideshow of pictures...
    
• For interactivity: HTML + CSS + JavaScript, W3C compliant.

For sound? Just don't. There is nothing more annoying than sounds on a webpage.