For Jonathan, they also have a Silverlight support page:
http://www.statowl.com/silverlight.php

You make a good point about Flash’s high barriers to entry ensuring it attracts a customer base who are committed to maximising their investment by using modern development techniques.

It occurs to me also that developers getting started in Flash (even hobbyists) are likely to start out using modern techniques simply because they are using a modern version of the authoring tool.

By comparison, a novice HTML developer might not be using an authoring tool at all, and their only guiding principal might be to ensure a site works in the most popular web browser (Internet Explorer), which as we know will soon default to an outmoded rendering engine.

It will be interesting to see how the X-US-Compatible instruction is implemented in future versions WYSIWYG software such as Dreamweaver. Will Dreamweaver omit the new meta tag altogether, target the most recent version of IE, or opt for “edge” rendering? If they choose to target the version of IE that is current at the time of each Dreamweaver release, it will be comparable to the Flash authoring tool targeting the current Flash player, ensuring that over time steady progress occurs even amongst web authors who have never heard of version targeting.

The direction taken by manufacturers of authoring software could play a very significant role in determining how version targeting is implemented by non-standards aware web authors.

PS: No, I don’t count Silverlight as a serious competitor to Flash! I had my doubts when Silverlight was launched, and it seems to have gone nowhere fast since then…

I think the comparison falls apart around the fact that, as you say, Flash has no real competitors (though if any Microsoft employees responsible for Silverlight read this, they may feel offended) and can update whenever they want, to their own specs not those provided by the W3C.

The lack of competitors means that when you create a Flash website, you only need it to work in Flash, not in Silverlight or any other potential competitor which may or may not implement it better. Where in Flash development you have one target, web development has a few, all of which are moving targets. Progressive Enhancement is never going to occur in Flash because you are targeted to Flash Player n only. Where we build sites that work in IE6, they can be spectacular in Firefox.

Of course, your point about uptake of the latest Flash player is encouraging, noting the apathy surrounding upgrades to IE7 and the ever present IE6 still trying to nudge the majority share of browsers. With full backwards compatibility big corporations with legacy systems will be more willing to upgrade as they can guarantee their systems aren’t going to break. This can only help those who want to use the latest and greatest features.

The only worry is that Flash development has it’s barriers to entry, and those to creating a web site are that much lower. This is why Flash developers will always push to use the latest version, as they already invested in it. This is the point in which the majority of the web may freeze in the year 2007, as it will be easy, it already is easy, for those who aren’t full time developers, or even interested to the level as those in this debate are, to continue to produce sites that render correctly in IE7.

Nice points, Jonathan, and an interesting perspective. Thanks.