Flash allows for freedom of development not found anywhere else. Flash allows the designer to place objects anywhere they want without having to worry about absolute / relative placement, box model problems, inconsistencies across browsers, z-indexes, tables-in-tables-in-tables, sliced up graphics and screen resolutions. In Flash you simply place the object on your canvas where you want it and move on. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!

Flash provides an interactive environment for a more involved multimedia experience. We’re not just talking about rollovers that swap colors or images, which, by the way, are a piece of cake in Flash, and can even include sound. We’re talking about the bigger deal here.

Flash allows you to incorporate sound into your pages via mp3 and wav files, allowing you to use, for example, speech or background music. You can also directly import digital video into Flash, which allows you to easily demo products or just show off the family. It’s true that Flash is not the only way to include video into a Web page. There are other tools, such as Windows Media Player, Real-Player, and QuickTime. However, the Flash player plug-in penetration is now at around 97%. Compared to Windows Media Player plug-in at 59%, Real-Player plug-in at 56% and QuickTime player plug-in at 41%, Flash is streets ahead.

Because of Flash’s vector rendering it has the ability to adjust the entire screen size based on the browser size and while doing so keep your images and text clean and unpixelated. This will become more of an advantage as people surf the web from alternative sources other than a desktop computer, such as a PDA, mobile phone, car display or wrist-watch.

Flash allows you to integrate any multimedia file format into your site. For example, bitmap image formats (such as, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PCT, TIF), vector image formats (including FreeHand files, EPS, Illustrator files), and as previously mentioned, sound formats (WAV, AIF, MP3) can all be imported into a Flash movie.

With Flash you have the ability to embed any font you wish and have it display in the client browser regardless of whether they have the font installed on their machine. You no longer have to convert fonts to images in order to maintain the font for display on varying user systems.

Flash can replicate the behavior of frames on an HTML Website in that it can maintain in a fixed position certain parts of the Web page, such as the navigation buttons, as other parts of the screen scroll.

Flash allows you to play movies as stand-alone presentations called projectors. Projectors are Flash movies that come complete with an embedded player — you don’t even need a Web browser to play these Flash movies! You can burn Flash projectors to CD-ROMs or DVDs.

Flash gives you the ability to display data as part of an ever-changing process without having to reload or refresh the page! That’s right — the data can change without even so much as a flicker from the browser.