HTML, over in a Flash

Should the newly-opened Flash format take over mainstream web development, forcing HTML into decline, then presumably the semantic web will be dead. There will end a notable experiment in creating a coherent system that ties the visual world of graphic design and typography with their fascinating subtlety of inflection to the editorial and data-centric, largely systematic world of structure; structured formats will simply become a gothic addendum to electronic data interchange as real users simply download endless binary files. Rather a pity.

At the same time I struggle to imagine how Flash usage can proceed without acquiring some notion that structure and visual form can align. Something, perhaps, driven by a markup language:

Dynamic text also has many formatting capabilities that static text does not have. These rich formatting capabilities are expressed as a subset of HTML text-markup tags.
(Source: Shockwave file format v.9 specifications)

But I don’t know much about Flash: the last time I looked it was for making little animations with.