Hi, I'm a web designer. For money. Really. A few professional opinions: Flash is a useful tool, but IMHO only for the following 3 applications: lo-bandwidth animated banner ads, SHORT cartoons that don't crash browsers, and interactive demonstrations that don't need to send data back to a server. As a site navigation toolmaker, it sucks, and DAZ demonstrated this with their new homepage. Developers like Flash because it has the bells and whistles of Java applets without the object-oriented programming learning curve and it really does work exactly the same on all browsers. What it doesn't come with is a booklet titled "Use Responsibly." The sad part is that the site structure at DAZ -- the part that really needed streamlining -- is still fundamentally the same. ] best rule of thumb, if a page takes over 2 seconds ] to download for you, leave the site. As far as "all pages should load in 2 seconds or less" is concerned, no one who has to earn a living designing pages can afford to sympathize with you. The ADA guidelines don't recognize "MTV Attention Deficit Disorder" as a valid disability, akamai backup servers are not free, and most of the Internet is still electrons being pumped through copper, not light through fiber optic. Even those of us with T1s at work and DSL at home have to put up with slow page loads of text-only resources. If it's any consolation, when browsers besides Netscape 7/Mozilla are CSS-3 compliant, the kinds of rollover effects that currently require bloated, cross-compatible JavaScript will be possible with a few lines of stylesheet code, no scripting and will degrade gracefully for disabled users. ] xoconostle, ] "what's the objection to XML?" ] it is another easily abused clientside scripting language. I have no idea what the hell you're talking about. XML is neither side-specific nor a scripting language, it's a protocol for data description markup, usually in the context of an application's mining data for translation to another, specific format or importing a set of preferences the way .INI files used to.