I tend to believe that Flash and other proprietary, browser-based runtimes are not a good idea.
But, people seem to love them because they are pretty and offer developers a lot of power as long as they get on board with buying the tools, etc.
Does anyone see a future where such a business model doesn’t exist? I think there is a great opportunity for a standards-based graphical toolset using javascript, css, and html to compete with (and preferably, for me, defeat) Flash-based tools.
What does Flash offer that can’t be accomplished with the basic building blocks of the web? What would a possible successor to Flash need to tackle to seriously be a ‘Flash-killer?’
Mozilla is trying this very hard with HTML 5 for things such as video, audio and drag&drop. However, they aren’t being very successful yet since other some other browsers, including Internet Explorer and older versions of Firefox, don’t implement these technologies.
As a result, I don’t think Flash-like technologies(including Silverlight) will be gone soon.