A Love Letter to Flash

Dearest Flash,

It's come to my attention that even in the past year, people have continued to be unkind to you, calling you useless, annoying, and the bane of a content-driven internet. I've heard that your reputation continues to be marred by certain miscreants who abuse you and say all manner of insult against you. It's not your fault that you've been mishandled and forced to do things that you were never meant to do. So I write this letter as a reaffirmation of my love to you, letting you know why I will continue to love and support you.

First, I love how you continually keep yourself fresh, changing on almost a yearly basis. I know that most of the arguments against you are based on who you were 5 years ago, when you were still dressing in Actionscript 1.0 and using those silly shape tweens (I've finally forgiven you for those). Over the last few years, you have won over this programmer's heart with object-oriented modeling, unified event handling, and a new virtual machine. Even your graphical advances like blending effects and custom anti-aliasing have made the designer in me smile. Such versatility has great potential and I've even seen it at work in more complex websites like Road Runner's (to be honest, I couldn't believe it was you at first).

Furthermore, you have brought so much beauty and yes, even accessibility, to many industries. Who would ever use YouTube if it required Real Media Player? Or who would visit Kongregate only to find Java-based games? Where would I get my creative fix if not for TheFWA.com? You continue to make photography vibrant and education fun. You've even visited the business sector, providing clean visualizations for Google Analytics and Yahoo Finance.