I'd written the previous blog post title intending a little light pun, based on (in case you didn't know) a line from the film Flash Gordon which is sampled on Queen's theme song from the motion picture - the one whose chorus goes (sing along if you know the words) "Flash! Ah-ah, saviour of the universe!". It's only after I posted it that it occured to me that, in the context of what I'd just said about breaking out of the page-based web model and dynamic, attractive web interface development, the fact that the song was about Flash (enjoy that URL while it still works, before Adobe replace it with a PDF...) might be relevant...
The irony that Queen seem to have succeeded, in 1980, in namechecking two of the major client-side dynamic web technologies that would be in use some 25 years later is testimony, I'm sure you'll agree, to Freddie Mercury's astonishing foresight and phenomenal facial hair (I'm going to have to have a re-listen and see if he also mentions CSS). It's also interesting that I'm not the only person to ever have commented that in some ways, Flash is probably one of the closest technologies out there to HyperCard, the other hypertext medium that I mentioned in my last post. But while it's true, Flash does offer a way to achieve some of those same things I argued for in that post - non-pagebound, interactive user interfaces - it's not the saviour of the universe in this case. I'm going with AJAX, for one simple reason - exemplified by the next sample in Queen's song:
Flash! Flash! I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the earth!
To which, of course, Flash replies:
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