Part of the great difficulty in this type of work is getting a predictable runtime engine onto all of the audience members’ individual machines.

The Macromedia Flash Player already has very high desktop presence (higher than IE/Win!), and the adoption costs (download, installation, habits & UI) are much lower than for any browser.

The document browsers *are* converging on advanced functionality — this year, for example, marks the first time large numbers of developers are comfortable in doing live data requests from their audience members’ varied machines — but if you can do something in some SVG and JavaScript today, go for it!

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support

SVG is a good standard for graphics, and JavaScript is also a good language, but you’re missing your target saying that… The reason (amongst others) developers/designers use flash is because of the ease in which you implement media into flash and then customize it.

I can load audio, video, xml, POSTs and WebServices into Flash, on the fly – try doing that with JavaScript ;) – xml is only supported in IE as far as I know via JavaScript and it’s blocked after SP2 in XP, isn’t it? Audio is non-streaming, mostly either wave or in the form of MIDI, and now we’re talking the happy days of 1997 :) with the black personal homepages with midi sounds and abundant moving gifs.
In my opinion Flash is a development environment, and not only a creative graphics tool. This is something I believe even more after reading the news-post above.

xml is only supported in IE as far as I know via JavaScript and it’s blocked after SP2 in XP, isn’t it?

For the record, that’s not right. XML works to a useful level in most modern browsers. SVG support is still sadly lacking, however, let alone SVG with embedded multimedia.

I can load audio, video, xml, POSTs and WebServices into Flash, on the fly – try doing that with JavaScript ;) –

LOL, you live in an ancient world!! All that can be done in JavaScript too. Dude, you ought to come out from your cabin & visit the outside world(latest on web development) often!! ;)

xml is only supported in IE as far as I know via JavaScript and it’s blocked after SP2 in XP, isn’t it?

Like I said, you ought to get around & know what’s happening around!! ;) XML is not restricted to IE only!! Its available in Mozilla/FireFox & Opera as well, though their implementation is different than IE. But you can come over that by writing a wrapper which detects the browser & executes the proper code.