Flash

Standard: The Flash file format (which is also known as SWF - Shockwave Flash) is a proprietary format owned by Macromedia.

Maturity: The Flash format is widely deployed and has gained widespread acceptance within the market place. However if resources have been created in a later version e.g. Flash v.8, then they may not be interoperable with older versions of the Flash player. Users will need to download and install the latest version of the Flash player. The file format should strictly be referred to as SWF. Flash refers to authoring environment, content delivery format and plugin. However in practice the term Flash is used to refer to the SWF format.

Risk Assessment: The proprietary Flash format is widely used to create interactive and multimedia Web resources. Tools to create Flash are readily available. Although a browser plugin is required to view Flash resources, such plugins are widely deployed with many browsers. However Flash is a proprietary format and usage is subject to a licence. It should be noted that, as a binary format, there may be some interoperability problems and the use of a single URI for a Flash file can make it difficult to identify a specific portion of a Flash resource for bookmarking, annotation, etc. and older versions of the format have accessibility limitations. The (binary) Flash format may not be particularly interoperable.