Soviut wrote: He’s saying that a site should be able to degrade gracefully back to an HTML version if Flash isn’t installed

Actually thats not really what hes saying at all. He saying that Flash (as a technology) should be blamed for the shortcomings of the person who created it. Your comments about why you dont like full Flash sites because it takes away certain features you have become used to is a valid point (e.g. back button, deep linking etc). However many sites and Flash developers are beginning to implement these features. the fact that it isn’t out of the box is a gripe that the Flash developer should have, not you as the viewer. You dont have to do the extra work to implement it if you are the person visiting the page, so I’m not sure I understand your gripe there. And as for the long animations and no way to escape, again, a problem with the creator not the technology.
The problem with Scobles statements arent the fact that he got an error when he shouldnt have, its his over the top misdirected finger pointing at the technology rather then the implementation.

Thanks for the comment!

I can’t stop a Flash site from playing a frustratingly long animation or from playing a loud soundtrack by hitting the stop button (unless its been manually added). I can’t go back to the last “page” by hitting the back button (unless its been manually added). I can’t refresh the current “page” I’m on in a Flash movie (unless its been added manually). I can’t bookmark a page (unless its been added manually)…starting to see the pattern?

All this functionality that comes automatically with a standard HTML page has to be manually, and often tediously, added by the the designer. Flash makes for a good application platform, it does the whole applet thing cleaner than Java ever did, and safer than ActiveX did. And I’d much rather see the “plugin not installed” error for the news ticker on a website, rather than for the *entire* website.