Flash(tm) has a place on the internet, but being used to move the odd bit of text about is definitely not it! Sledgehammer, nut, smash. However, doubtless much to Adobe's glee, the idea that all animations on the web are obliged to use Flash has somehow become deeply ingrained into the public psyche, and more importantly those members of the public who ask us to develop websites for them.

But then along came the iPhone, a device for the near exclusive use of trendy-young-things, awash with plenty of that indispensible disposable income that keeps businesses in business. Now all of a sudden that Flash animation becomes invisible to the very market sector you most want to influence. Is it time perhaps to fall back (yet again) to the tried and trusted technologies that work on all devices?

As a quick example I have created an example here:

But the really interesting thing to note is what happens if you switch the javascript off. It stops moving, but your banner remains:

No nagging message telling you your plug-in is out of date, and that you really ought to spend the next half an hour downloading a 20MB file and getting Wizard Fatigue.

Now, I don't want this to sound like a lecture, but instead I want it to be a message of hope. HTML5 is around the corner, and a whole plethora of new technologies are about to come on-line, such as scalable vector graphics, opengl and so forth. Sorry, did I say new? I mean a whole plethora of technologies we should have had years ago might finally arrive at a browser near you, and what on earth kept them?

What this means is that both the simple javascript animation I show you here and Flash may soon (I mean eventually) be consigned to the dustbin of history, and the tried and trusted technologies will expand to fill their shoes. We can't wait.