On October 29, 2000, Usability Guru Jacob Nielsen made the web design community quake when he published his now-infamous essay Flash: 99% Bad denouncing the state of Macromedia Flash on the Internet as "a usability disease."

Macromedia Flash is a vector-based digital design tool. Graphics and animations created with it are based on mathematical lines instead of individual pixels, resulting in smaller file sizes (shorter download times) and greater visual scalability (it retains similar qualities on Web pages, televisions and movie screens).

For its first few years, Flash was primarily used by designers to add eye candy to Web sites and was commonly scorned for its poor implementation. Today, Flash has evolved into a powerful design and development tool with the potential for incredibly sophisticated application. Here's what happened.

Nielson's 2000 essay articulated why Flash made Web sites difficult for everyone to use and why disabled people using text-based browsers had insurmountable issues with it. He said it encouraged "design abuse" and that in most cases we would be better off without it.

The reaction was ear-shattering cacophony. Nielsen was called a heretic. He was yelled at, screamed at, denounced, ridiculed and verbally abused by the online design community. Somebody even created a Driving over Jacob Nielson game. Notably, Joshua Davis, perhaps the greatest flash designer ever, told the BBC: "I'd beat [Nielsen] up if I saw him."

The arguments against Nielsen were varied, but centered around an accusation from designers that he wanted them to assume that all their sites' visitors were idiots. He argued back by telling the BBC that designers should "design for humans instead of for yourself."

Unlike a modern-day Thomas Cromwell, Nielsen rose above the fray and defended his position across all media. Likely, his professional reputation was made by this essay. But its consequences affected far more than just his own career.

Macromedia'a CEO Rob Burgess, who only days before had inanely commented to ZDNet that bad Flash was "not the problem of the tool [but] the problem of the designer," realized that he was balanced precariously at a precipice. An anti-flash furor had just been shifted into high-gear. And he was in the position of a cigarette manufacturer blaming lung cancer exclusively on smokers.

Burgess decided to listen.

Two major iterations of Flash later (and following Macromedia brilliantly hiring its most vocal critic, Jacob Nielsen, to develop its usability and accessibility guidelines), Flash MX has emerged as the foundation for Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. There is now an official Macromedia Flash Accessibility Developer Kit that contains guidelines, Smart Clips, and sample code to support development efforts. As well, Flash has emerged as an artistic medium in and of itself.

Numerous conferences and festivals have started in the past few years to celebrate the maturing chrysalis of Flash and the elements of design, art, business, electronic music, digital video, video games and other aspects of new media that now go with it. Among the most renown of these is FlashInTheCan, a Toronto-based gathering that enjoyed its third anniversary in April.

Shawn Pucknell, the festival founder and director, says that he is "incredibly happy with how the 2004 FlashintheCan festival went. We ended up with over 900 attendee's … from as far away as Mexico, Europe, South Africa, and Australia. Each year, we seem to be getting bigger and better, with more and more global interest, which helps put Canada squarely on the map within the new media world."

It was an all-star cast of dazzling proportions. Colin Moock, Guy Watson, Brendan Dawes, Daniel Dura, Kevin Towes & Joshua Davis were all speaking, and many were awed and humbled by their presentations.

FlashInTheCan was also an excellent venue for discussing the nature of Flash art. Whether or not 'Code Experimentors' could be considered artists and if 'Intentional art is design' were two fervently-argued topics of the "Is It Art Yet?" panel.

The technology is now much-improved from the time of Nielsen's original essay, and, as Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect for Macromedia, said during his keynote presentation, all that remains is to get the large community of Flash developers to embrace the now-official Macromedia usability and accessibility principles in their actual RIA design and development.

Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.

As Darren Pereira from hot Toronto design shop Indusblue said, "A lot of guys here agree that it's necessary, but ignore it because they don't understand it. We're all still learning about [these new best practices] and are here because we want to make things better."

Pucknell says, "there's still lots of room to improve, and that's [a reason] for having events like the FlashintheCan festival, were people can come and learn and discuss issues such as these ones."

There was supposed to be a Flash Accessibility seminar, but it was cancelled.

Kevin Airgid presented the Flash Usability seminar, and related several excellent points from his book 'Flash 99% Good: A Guide to Macromedia Flash Usability' (a response to Nielsen's essay). He spoke about the design and business benefits of making a site usable: "Cause a bad experience and the brand suffers." When asked about making use of Flash's advanced options for making sites accessible for disabled users, however, he said: "I don't know anything about accessibility issues and I don't talk about them."

The time for education about these issues is now.

Creating art for art's sake is one thing, but a developer who creates an inaccessible site for a client is guilty of professional negligence.

Flash isn't 99% bad anymore. Instead, it has empowered designers with the capability for great good and great evil.

God bless the artists who want to create art for art's sake. But developers who create inaccessible sites for their clients are guilty of professional negligence and should be forced to surf with text-based browsers for a month.