> The <embed> tag When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services

> The <embed> tag When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services like youtube possible. > DHTML It existed, sure, but on top of IE and NS having completely unrelated solutions, even within each browser the behavior varied randomly by OS and version, and defied graceful degradation. In those days if displaying correctly for a meaningful subset of both mac and PC users was important, you used Flash.