This might be a bit heavy for only being the second post on our newly created blog but since everyone else and their lemur have already weighed in on the subject, I thought I’d step up as well.

First, some background for anyone that isn’t aware. Microsoft announced how IE8 would attempt to avoid the problems caused by the launch of IE7 which coincided with the publication of two articles on A List Apart: Aaron Gustafson’s explanation of the idea and Eric Meyer’s discussion of his personal reaction. Subsequently, some people’s heads exploded. I strongly suggest you read the articles (and their ensuing comments) to get appraised of the situation before continuing on here.

There seems to be a lot of backlash to the idea and yet I don’t find myself that upset or opposed. I can’t really figure out who it is that is so negatively affected. In order to make sure I wasn’t just missing something, I started to look at the stakeholders in this decision and how they would be impacted.

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We’ve been building websites here at MARSWorks Inc. for many years and have faced many challenges. We’ve often struggled to decide whether or not we’d become more of a FLASH shop or stick to our current style which can best be described as “build anything and in any platform”. We’ve always believed in the philosophy of determining the situation our client and the web audience is in, and then determine the best possible tools and technologies to apply to that situation. Often, the choice of a platform or tool like FLASH poses many challenges in making the site truly accessible, or friendly to Search Engines, or people without the ability to download the FLASH plugin.

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