The multiple facets of flow analysis. A tutorial.

The amazing development of flow analysis has led to a loss of conceptual uniformity and to the proposals of a number of modalities, each assigned to an acronym, and this aspect may hinder further developments in the field. As any sample handling step of a flow-based analytical procedure can be accomplished in different ways, there are multiple facets associated to it. This tutorial is focused on the critical evaluation of these facets and the proposal of a novel way to present the flow analyzers, disregarding or even avoiding the need for specifying flow modalities and acronyms.