Beardie's airline Virgin America has decided it wants iPhone users to check in for flights using their mobile and is removing Flash from its website to do it.
The outfit is the first to heed Steve Jobs' call and build a website which is not based around the Flash standard on the rest of the web.
Most web users can use Flash, but owners of Apple's expensive toy can't because Steve Jobs has had a spat with Flash.
Virgin's new Flash-free website will be responsible for bringing in 70 per cent of the company's $100 million in quarterly revenues.
It replaces a previous version that used Flash and was less than three years old.
The tame Apple press claims that it all goes to show how powerful Apple is in the field of new web development to use open web standards rather than proprietary binary platforms like Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.
However there are a shortage of alternatives as the latest versions of HTML5 have not been ratified yet. Virgin says it will move to the new features in HTML5 as the standard is ratified. Until then, company representatives said today's HTML is "good enough" to do what the company had been using Flash to do on its previous site.
Appleinsider has been trying to come up with reasons why HTML needs to be used instead of Flash. The belief has been that Flash cannot offer touch centric controls.
Adobe is working on pushing out new enhancements to Flash to accommodate touch-centric environments in new content.
Ironically many of the members of the press believe that Jobs' Mob wants the standard to be more open, when it is more likely that Steve does not want people using free flash games which have not been bought from his digital iTune's store.
i really wish someone could give steve a big slap and take him and apple down a few pegs, they're so far up their own ar$e!!1
Flash is great for certain things, but something like this is really not what it should be used for. Removing it should open the website up to a lot more people.
I know my phone doesn't work well with flash, but manages HTML just fine. (It's not an iPhone). Good on them.
Remember, the 'flash standard on the rest of the web' is only standard for those people that can reliably run flash, which pretty much limits it to PCs. More and more people these days are accessing the internet on portable devices that aren't really upto the task of handling it.
The best thing a web designer can do is use the most appropriate technologies for the problem at hand, and often for things like check-in screens, flash simply isn't it.