Think about the process of filling out a series of forms on a HTML based website. As you move from one screen to the next the screen goes completely white before going to the next screen. The amount of time that the screen goes white depends on you connection speed and the server’s speed. A usability study found that people get a little stressed when the screen goes white. Perhaps they think the signup process is going to crash on them as it probably has in the past. This ranks poorly on the usability scale. Most HTML based forms or applications are multi-page applications. This usually happens when the user’s session expires. This only happens in HTML based applications. There are ways around this using DHTML and other tricks but generally this is a problem for HTML.

If you were to use Flash to make applications then you would not have to reload the screen every time the conditions change. You could do everything on one page that dynamically changes to suit the application. Strike another one up for Flash in the long and controversial debate between Flash and HTML.