Wow. Certainly a different perspective. I thought Flash really changed the way we view the web for the better (video, audio, animation, interaction) pushed by artists who wanted these things for their own creative fulfillment, and standards should be grateful. I remember being told by pedantic standards advocates that all those things were not the purpose of the web and had no business, yet we did it any way out of "irresponsible" desire for "shiny toy" (I do find those descriptions slightly offensive, btw -- "pedantic" and "hyper-technical" are both terms I've heard such people use as words of praise for themself, but I don't mean them as compliments so I suppose I deserve the offense.)

I just wish you could do your thing, and I could do mine. Well, congrats, you win.

How so? Open standards have held open standards back. Usually, competition is what drives things forward. Flash won for a long time because it was better.

Even today, compare flash games to games done with web standards, and that's after everyone has put considerable effort into making their JavaScript engines faster!

With apologies to Carl Sagan, not everyone wants to create a universe to make an apple pie.

W3C held open standards back, everything web related was more or less moribund for 10 years while they wanked off about xhtml and the semantic web. What people wanted was to build applications with web technologies, thats why flash won.