What is Flash?

Flash is a vector animation (read about vector animation software) software, originally designed to create animations for display on web pages. Vector graphics are ideal for the web because they are so lightweight.

Over the releases of new versions of Flash, Macromedia has made Flash more and more controllable via programming, where they have it positioned as a competitor to HTML to build interactive web sites and applications such as an e-commerce store. Macromedia argues that Flash is the way to go instead of HTML because of the following reasons:

• Flash movies load faster and save on download time because Flash is vector based whereas HTML is not.
• Flash intelligently caches its movies so they dont have to be reloaded.
• Flash gives the user (the person viewing/using the Flash movie) a more responsive rich-client like experience.

Flash pages can be made to load faster, but most of the time, the way they are designed in the real world, they do not. That is not a Flash problem, it is more an issue of the Flash developers going nuts with fancy and heavy Flash movies.