The other day I was trying to look at some site from my iphone but alas, the site was crawling with Flash embedded objects (from menu navigation to actual site content). At first I became frustrated that the iPhone didn’t support Adobe Flash embedded objects, but then I started thinking further, and I realized that I’ve never really liked flash-based sites.

I don’t want to start a flamewar between those who are in favor of having flash objects on their sites and does who despise the use of flash on them (including SEO people), but to me building a site in flash that disables the back button, puts a big and unneeded intro and puts all the information inside the embedded object is simply a poor way of creating a website; and this is not flash’s problem, but the developer’s who go for pretty instead of functional. I do have a question, though… Are flash-based sites accessibility friendly?

But as more and more iPhones are sold and used to browse the web, more people will start complaining, and hopefully site owners will start listening and start converting all those sites into something that can be read by everyone. And as more and more devices start appearing, more site designers will realize that html, although basic and plain, can be made functional to work on all or most of these devices with the help of CSS and/or other html-related abilities.

So, I am really glad that iPhones don’t support Flash. Heck, I can even say I’m glad it doesn’t support applets either (although I wish I could program iPhone apps in Java), as long as it will make people create “normal” sites.