What’s that silver thing again?

I’ll confess that, when I’m wearing my “just a user” hat, I’ve (mostly) made my peace with Flash — usually, these sites tend to redner as intended, and plugin support in Firefox 2 was good enough to take care of my installation needs without me thinking much. Which means that flash sites are mostly noticeable for being annoyingly noisy (so much fun when you skype into a telephone conference), or maybe unusable — as my bank’s pretty new login form. (I’m back to paper when they make that thing mandatory for online banking customers.)In Silly season, Mark Pilgrim gives a fine rant, and a survey of the latest attempts to rebuild the Web by breaking its core design principles. Seems like the system I use is non-mainstream enough again to simply show me those “plugin not supported” errors for a while, as a reminder that some sites use proprietary technology at their own peril.Thanks to Microsoft and Adobe for the nice demonstration (again) of why proprietary just doesn’t work on the Web!(Found via Silverfish and Appallingo by Paul Downey.)