Adobe Flash was notorious for being insecure and a vector for malware and Adobe finally killed it off in December of last year. I don't miss it at all. (One of my least favourite jobs as a technical writer was updating a user guide that the previous writer had written in Flash).
The last weekend, with reruns of news clips from 2001, has revealed a side-effect of killing off Flash. A lot of web sites from that era used Flash, and now their content in inaccessible. That includes quite a bit of news footage, as this article from CNN points out.
Adobe ending support for Flash — its once ubiquitous multimedia content player — last year meant that some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. For example, The Washington Post and ABC News both have broken experiences within their September 11th coverage, viewable in the Internet Archive. CNN's online coverage of September 11th also has been impacted by the end of Flash.
That means what was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that "Adobe Flash player is no longer supported."
It's yet another example of how format creep is going to cause problems for archivists, librarians, and historians in future years.
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