Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Adobe has decided to partner with Yahoo and Google, specifically, in order to enable search engine access to Flash contents. In other words, web builders that use bad web practices have been rewarded, and can continue to use Flash to completely build their sites, without regard for accessibility or an open web. The site designers do not have to worry their pretty little heads any longer, because the big boys have come to an “arrangement of mutual benefit”, and have decided that no, their shit does not stink.
I’d like to think that one reason Adobe is making this move is because it feels threatened from competition by SVG, but even a fangirl like myself has to acknowledge that much of this is probably related to recent moves into the animation and rich content field by other not-to-be named competitors. Besides, what chance does an open sourced, and openly accessible, technology have against such attractively packaged vendor lock-in? I mean, Google, Adobe: what more would we want?
We should just quit work on HTML5, right now. RDFa, too, not to mention microformats. Forget that semantic markup stuff, and the debate over ABBR. Who needs SVG, anyway? We have Flash, and Flash can be searched. The web has arrived.
