Bitt, I know you know what you said is loose. I *knew* someone would come back with the image example. It's weak though. Because the image format is irrelevant as long as it's one supported by HTML, which JPG is. You can transform the image within HTML, so in that regard, the content respects the bounds put upon it by the markup and style layers and is directly produced/drawn/displayed by the rendering layer. Flash isn't. It's a whole other framework running inside a box. That framework can be anything, even another browser within the real browser. The bottom line is that Flash duplicates (and augments of course) what's outside of it, albeit in a way that has no relation to the building blocks used in those outside layers - and without any regard for even duplicating the same type of rendering.

You can argue that anything you serve via HTTP is "the web" but that's not the point here. Flash is essentially a stand-alone entity that people have shoehorned into web browsers. To display content that would otherwise use the web browser for rendering. Sure, you could do a bunch of stuff in Flash that wasn't possible using the browser's rendering engine, regardless of what markup used or how much javascript you threw at it.

But it's no more "the web" or a "web site" than a custom application written using ActiveX, C++ or whatever you want to use, shoehorned into the display rect of a web page. Flash is essentially a virtual machine, and the web site is the thing that holds it.

Flash != Web. Never has, never will. I'm sorry, but essentially, asinine is anyone who has been developing in Flash for the web. You have to draw the lone somewhere and I've drawn it at a pretty comfortable and easy to see and define place.

You'd have to argue much harder to say that the iPad doesn't display the whole web than you would otherwise. The comment in the commercial is totally fair. You can't play Flash games on the iPad. You also can't run Windows games nor Mac games, in our outside a web browser.

Yes, some sites do use a lot of flash content and that content will be missing when the sites are viewed on an iPad. Yes, some of that content may be essential to the site. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for those sites - most of them use Flash blocks unnecessarily to say the least. Once they wake up and realize that the web site is everything around their non-standard Flash blocks they can move on to create something usable by everyone. The fact that Flash doesn't work on the iDevices is actually the least of the problem for these folks. But it's finally a significant enough catalyst that they can't ignore it.