Flash has some really quite incredible features that we struggle with implementing with HTML/CSS/JS: Sound, Dynamic vector drawing, Sockets, local storage, video. I could go on. Why the hell are we struggling with and VML? Comet is essentially a hack while XMLSockets are built in to Flash…and then you have Red 5. To add to this, Apollo has just been released which is looking pretty interesting. See what I mean?
The sweet spot for JavaScript and Ajax has always been for those small, progressive enhancements rather than for creating rich interfaces. It seems to me that the more you head in that direction with JavaScript the more serious limitations you encounter. Browser JavaScript is never fast, has memory leak issues, browser bugs, CSS bugs and all manner of other tom foolery that, when you get to the stage of building something like for Google Maps gets really time consuming and messy.
There are many efforts (WHATWG, Tamarin etc etc) that are working toward solving many of these problems but for now and for the foreseeable future we are stuck with em. This, I think, is when it’s time to bring out Flash. Not for the whole app of course, but used in conjunction with HTML/CSS/JS. Flash however is not without it’s problems.
