Dear HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Flash is more flexible

Nate Klaiber is spot on. I had this same conversation with Jason at ThunderTech a while ago. As much of a proponent I am for web standards, it’s not the technology that’s to blame.

One of the key issues in this space is the lack of a good IDE for developing media rich websites without Flash. That’s what makes Flash so attractive to designers, the ease of creating these multimedia based websites. Dreamweaver doesn’t come close.

Over the last few years we’ve seen major Flash studios, like Fantasy-Interactive, make the move to web standards.

Even though HTML/CSS/JS is far more semantic, more accessible and more flexible, we don’t possess the tools to build a really top-notch IDE.

The bigger question is… should we bother building such an IDE? I’m not so sure. It’s the transparency of the markup that makes HTML/CSS/JS so accessible. Abstracting that markup in an IDE would probably bring along the same issue’s that plagues Flash today.