I'm not sure which of these is a more compelling criticism of the Apple iPad: "They named it what?" or "Where's the Flash?"

It's no secret that Apple harbors no love for Adobe's Flash architecture. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball recently wrote up a wonderful treatise as to why this is the case. If you have a spare hour or so, I recommend giving it a look-see. I'll spoil the ending for the sake of continuing on with this column: Flash is a proprietary architecture that Apple has no control over. Thus, when Flash-based elements wreak havoc on the stability of Apple platforms, Apple can't do much to fix the issue--nor can the company convert the 32-bit Flash binary over to Apple's goal of a system-wide, 64-bit experience.

Naturally, Apple's only real choice has been to dump support for Flash in certain use situations--namely, the company's iPhone (and surely the iPad as well, given the supposed similarities in their underlying operating systems). In order to incorporate a similar level of interactivity and video processing as delivered by Flash, Apple's turned to a combined replacement of HTML5 and JavaScript. But the media codec that Apple's thrown its support behind for HTML-based video rendering is H.264. Ain't nothing open about that.

The enemy of Apple's proprietary enemy might be the company's friend, but it's no friend to the Internet.