Iostream,
I am actually doing research on the subject. When I started programming a while back I dove right it to DHTML. There are pros and cons on why use DHTML rather than Flash.
As funky monk has stated it depends a lot on your target audience.
Flash is great for :
- reacting to user input,
- animations,
- games,
- adding sounds to your web experience,
- integrating rich media on your site.
Audience better reached with Flash is usually teens, young adults and individuals.
Other cons :
- Requires a plugin. (Macromedia does state that 98% of all web users have the macromedia flash player, they cannot however back that information and many of those flash players are old version 3 players that are not compatible with todays flash movies).
- usage of Flash still is very youth oriented. Many of the most serious companies do not like using flash as it tends to push off serious businesses.
- too often flash is built with the assumption that someone is ready to wait for a movie to load all its components (sound, images etc..)
Other pros :
- you know that so long as the person has the plugin it will work regardless of browser version.
What DHTML is great for :
- reacting on user input,
- animation (not as good as flash however),
- adding components on a web page (menus, trees, inner frames, table sorting, bubble, etc...)
Audience reached is a more serious, usually older crowd. Palm.com uses flash for its menu as well as many other sites.
Other cons :
- despite cross-browser scripting abilites the programmer often needs to make sure his script works in all types of platform and browsers,
- not all DHTML degrades well as it is left to the programmer to do a good job,
- to get really good DHTML you need one of the most recent version of browsers (ie6, ns6)
Other pros :
- because DHTML is CSS, HTML and JavaScript it is fast to download.
- it expands on existing technologies,
- it does not need a plugin.
- serious companies have a better time accepting DHTML as an web application then Flash.
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This said I believe that Flash is a better suited for games, design companies that want to show off and people that want to have audio control on their web site.
dHTML remains a choice for people like me though as it allows to add functionalities without the usage nor the limits set by an IDE.
But as my boss tells me "The best tools are the one you master.". And I don't master Flash yet. Gary
Haran
