[ Original poster here ] The stance that "images have no place on the Web" is the oldest of the lot, dating back to Netscape 2.0 days... it's hard to remember

[ Original poster here ] The stance that "images have no place on the Web" is the oldest of the lot, dating back to Netscape 2.0 days... it's hard to remember or even believe now, but people did rail against the IMG tag. Back in the late 90s there was much argumentation that "things shouldn't move on webpages". This has died down as people have realized how motion can help clarify interfaces (iPhone's intertial drag helped lots), but we're still not at the point of universal acceptance that animation helps increase the total number of people who find the message accessible. My point was that the arguments against richer interfaces have died down, as the browsers slowly advance to bring such abilities within reach. There will always be criticism of the leading edge, but Silverlight, iPhone, and "HTML5" have each helped convert camps away from the belief that only permissible medium is lengthy English text. (SEO has had the gosh-darnedest amount of misinfo spread about... search engines have reached inside SWF for years and years, as the old Slashdot example query of "'contrary evidence' filetype:swf" showed. Start by visualizing the terms on which people will likely seek your services... research the competition you have for the first ten Google hits on the term... then optimize your pages for those terms in the usual way, as recommended by the search engines' guidelines. The "every little bit of dynamic text" fascination is starting to bite Ajax now too, so I have hope it will soon go away. ;-) jd/adobe