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Comment by blahpro | Hacker News Reader

“There are ± 100 million websites out there with Flash content.”

Plus or minus?

Also, I tried to copy and paste that text from the footer but I couldn’t because it’s all wrapped up in Flash.

you can't open links in a new tab either; so the page also highlights areas where Flash is a nightmare and should be discouraged.

That's not true. Flash doesn't prevent you from copying text. You can copy other text on the page, and that's still in flash. It's probably something they simply didn't do with putting together the page.

That's the point. With HTML you must to try hard to disable copying of text.

If that's the point the OP was trying to make, he did it poorly. And it's not that hard. Heck, you see it all the time. Images as text.

I was replying to this:

  It's probably something they simply didn't do
  with putting together the page.

Flash sites are annoying also because they break a lot of simple, but very useful things: copying of text, different URLs to different parts of the site (all-flash sites usually have only one url and now way to share address to some specific content), opening links in new tabs by middle-clicking them, scrolling with mouse wheel. I know that _now_ some of these are possible to do properly in flash, bet you have to put some effort into that, and that's rarely done. One the other hand text and links in HTML5 will display and work as expected no matter what browser you use HTML5 capable or not. I can enhance plain navigation with some nifty CSS animations and transitions. If users browser does not support that it will have just the same plain navigation. If I do that in Flash and Flash plugin is not available — too bad. That's the beauty of progressive enhancement which you don't have in the case of Flash.

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