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Macromedia Pushes Flash For All Things Web
nakhla writes: "This article at News.com details how Macromedia is expanding its Flash product to be more of an all-in-one web solution. Rather than relying on HTML codes to design web pages and embedding Flash as one component, Macromedia wants Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site. Pre-built components, such as scrollbars and buttons, are included to allow designers to write everything using the new Flash product. With websites becoming more and more complex, and the trend to move towards providing web services rather than application software, could something like this be the answer? The article also mentions how Macromedia is on a campaign to have its Flash plugin included in all Internet-compatible devices. How long before we see a Qt based plugin for the Qtopia handheld project?"
..because all it adds is FLASH, not SUBSTANCE.
I've never seen Flash add any value whatsoever to a site. This is an awful move, yet one that's sure to succeed because salespeople and the great unwashed ignorant masses like shiny things.
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How would sites written in Flash be accessible to disabled users of the internet, that rely on alt-tags and other items to navigate a site successfully. I had a hard enough time trying to navigate DoCoMo's website (in flash) through the Babelfish translator. I can only imagine how hard it would be were the site in English and the user blind or unable to use their hands/fingers/etc....
This of course depends on how it's used. Some of the nicest sites I've ever seen have been flash. And I wouldn't mind seeing more *commercial*,*non-porn* sites in flash.
Most home sites don't need it, most useful sites shouldn't use it (for accessability reasons, and because they'll need mostly text), and most porn sites would... well, let's just say I don't want 10 windows of jiggling cartoon flesh unless I ask for them.
Flash will continue to have its place, but we've probably reached a steady state as to where its acceptable.
Yeah, but don't they already know that Microsoft owns the Web now? In fact, I heard from Matt Drudge that Microsoft representatives are currently in talks with Tim Berners-Lee and other high-ranking W3C officials to rename it the Microsoft Slave Network.
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monolinux.com
Flash movies in the middle of a site (or as a "splash page") suck ass, but the link they give for a site made with the beta of the new flash is kind of nice. It's much faster and easier on the eyes than similarly-formatted sites like orbitz or travelocity.
Of course I haven't seen everything that these flash-sites can do, or will do, but I approve so far.
While I tend to think Flash sites are overdone, I do think that flash is useful. I wish, however, that there was a more open standard for developing flash-like functionality. Kind of like a postscript versus pdf. There aren't many non-commercial options when trying to develop this kind of functionality. Macromedia might want to rule the world, but they probably shouldn't.
-Sean
Go to Macromedia's website and get an installer for shockwave. You use Netscape or IE. Don't use one of those? Sorry, our installer won't let you install wherever you want or even detect other browsers - i.e. do the copy and paste kludge yourself. As far as I know Flash (not shockwave) STILL doesn't work under Mozilla. I've been browsing flash free for a while now, and it's actually quite nice. No annoying sounds or music all over the place. There are a few places that I can't navigate without flash, but that's what the back button is for.
Wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to embrace and extend this...
anyway as tons previous and future posts will tell, flash makes things complicated rather than practical. Most flash sites drown in goodies. Except for joecartoon (www.joecartoon.com) I have yet to see a truly original flash use.
The biggest problem is that flash wants to be a general system for making all things online That's exact the idea of HTML. Only HTML add the keywords indexeable, shareable and ease If macromedia can add those to flash, then perhaps we'll be getting somewhere.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I'm all for the progress of the Internet, and standardization, etc... BUT, are they (Macromedia) considering that not all people have wonder machines that can handle these applactions? Not to mention the fact that most people do NOT access the internet through a broadband connection - what? are they going to suffer through endless downloads of huge, bloated "flash sites" just to browse the internet? I don't think this is going to go over very well with most people.
Heck, I don't even like Flash-based websites. I think they are needlessly sluggish, annoying, bloated, and, in general, I'd rather be at a nice next based site with only a spattering of images, like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, or Everything2.
No thanks, Macromedia.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
I got sosick of all the flash ads and useless entrance page animations that I uninstalled the damn thing from my machine, no small feat I assure you. I ran the uninstaller(d/l'd from flash's website, not actually included) repeatedly to no avail. Finally, I resorted to just deleting the flash files themselves and removing any registry entries manually.
Made my browsing experience much better overall. Any site that requires you to have flash usually isn't worth visiting.
Flash is good, yeah. Should it completely take over the web? No! Pure flash sites also take a while to load on a 56k and below modem. For a long while, people are still going to be using dial up connections, and they're not going to enjoy it as much as they'd like if the whole web is in Flash.
the Political Inquirer
The benefit of HTML that I don't think Flash has, is that it is designed be displayed on a wide variety of devices. Very little in the HTML spec is concrete on how to display the information. Most definitions include a suggested way on how the user-agent could display something, but there is no requirement that it must. (This is why a well designed page can be displayed in lynx...)
Of course, for sites that are just there for the wow factor, this Flash thing might be the way to go.
There are still a large amount of people living where High Speed surfing isn't available. What good is a "cool site" when it takes 2 or 3 minutes to load to a browser?
I'm one of those folks, where I live there IS no cable hookup, DSL, or even ISDN. I'm stuck calling a city 20 miles away for my dialup to the net - thank the deities that I have access to a call pack that makes it a local call - since it would otherwise be considered a toll call for me to get online.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Good looking pages are only useful if you can see. How well, if at all.. is flash for the blind?
Can I increase the font size in a flash applet? No.
Those with poor or lack of vision are competely screwed by the use of flash, but they are just like Unix users... a minority; who cares about them?
One thing I did not like was that some of the ones I liked were entirely unlinkable. I could not even bookmark a page for my own referance. Great for designers wanting to keep absolute control over their content.
Bottom line, I never went back.
never mind that I wonder how a search engine will index a flash site. Heck, they usually do static pages only. Even java script calls to offsite get bypassed, nevet mind Flash.
So you have a great page that can only be ignored by search engines. Not that this is the way most sites get known, but it is a real issue.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Rather than relying on HTML codes to design web pages and embedding Flash as one component, Macromedia wants Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site [for all sites on the Internet]. Pre-built components, such as scrollbars and buttons, are included to allow designers to write everything using the new Flash product[to entice coders to use the Flash development environment].
:: All Linux, No Ads
Dude, 1996 called. Microsoft wants their business strategy back.
monolinux.com
Yeah, great idea. Just now that the push for an accessible web is gaining momentum, let's design more sites that people with disabilities such as visual impairments can forget about ever entering. Not to mention people with outdated equipment, non-mainstream OS platforms, etc.
I'm a web designer for a governmental entity (not in the USA), and I have adapted for blind users (WAI-Guidelines). The blind positively dislike flash, especially on the first page, especially if there is no "skip animation" button.
Stay away from flash: It burns bandwidth, it locks out people who use text browsers (lots of blind folk use Lynx!), it locks out anybody who does not have the newest version of flash, and it is prone to error. HTML may not be that spiffy, but it works. Today, it takes a lot to mess up an HTML page. With flash, this is too easy.
If Macromedia is so serious, they should consider that web developers have a much higher percentage of *nix people in the ranks. Yet no dev tools have been ported. Hmmmmm.... MM is buying the FUD.
Also, I smell the day coming when there will be a "Flash Tax" ala "GIF Tax", but Macromedia needs to become more entrenched before this can happen.
once everyone is happy to implement say 70-80% functionality of their site using Flash. Flash plug-in itself will no longer be just a 'plug-in'. I then becomes a browser itself. Then all M'media needs to do is to launch a better packaged Flash browser (or the flash player) and flock people to browse swf files instead of HTML.
Hence moving away from W3C standards. Then having the 'standard' themselves and change it as much as they like at anytime and launch new products.
By maintaining compatability with normal browser, they can certainly claim they are not trying to dominate the browser market even the browser itself becomes more of a launch pad for Flash.
That's how I see the evil plan anyway.
Flash is great and all but I hate it.
I find myself clicking skip intro and using the "non-flash" site all the time.
Maybe some people like blinking lights, animations, and bullshit, myself, I like clicking the damn link and seeing the porn. I don't need to wait for 3 mins for something to load (even over broadband) and then waiting 3 more minutes to find the bouncing lady to click.
I will stick to HTML, thank you.
I am wondering about the implications of search engines such as googles towards flash sites. I know google are able to search PDF, but flash?
It's too bad to see that they are pushing towards the 'closed' standard. HTML, although not particularily elegant, is open and free. I don't think too many of us are going to shelf out $199 just to write a website.
We will probably see bigger corporations starting to adopt it, but I don't foresee many small sites do.
geek page at KY speaks
Postign an article like this is like shooting fish in a barrell.
The goals of Flash are pretty much perpendicular to those of html.
Is HTML perfectly well thought out? Not really. But it's there, it's open, it's getting more standardized all the time. It works reliably on a lot of different platforms.
And through extensions like Flash, it can produce whatever monstrosity of a web site that evil designers can imagine.
That said, Flash only sites are annoying to use in a regular browser. Linking to certain parts of a site doesn't work (at least not usually), and back/forward are unreliable. But the solution should come from the Flash developer. When you click a link, the browser should move to a new page, one that initializes the same Flash data with the parameters to show the new page. Unfortunately, most Flash sites don't work that way. The browser stays on the same Flash data and the poor user is forced to use the Flash navigation.
Nothing better than right clicking and getting Pause, Play, and Stop...
/.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I just wonder in how many exciting ways this whole new shit is going to be exploited. Interactions between Javascript, Flash-bytecode, embeded html (?), IFRames, flash in xml in javascript in html in flash (?),....
Internet Explorer is being closed due to an unknown exception in kernel32.dll......
so its not necessarily a Bad Thing (TM). Flash is more efficient (and easier) for vector drawings and animations, and they could probably even make lightweight text display if they wanted to.
But I don't think this is the product. It can't really do animation, and it can't really do formatting. It's a case of the happy middle that ain't. Even if it was open, and better designed, its just a small bit between two very strong poles -- information (text and images), and entertainment (video and 3D games)
..And when is it they're going to submit their formats to the W3C?
Because otherwise, it's very bad juju...having everyone try to reverse engineer their format (DMCA, anyone?)...possibly breaking patents, etc.
Hugo
I like to think of flash like black paint or salt...
A little bit goes a looooong way.
Flash is fine for grpahical accents and small navigational elements that would otherwise require tons of scriptiong, but as for building and entire site on flash it's pretty much overkill.
Personally, I think flash would make a wonderful interface for embedded objects like PDA's and cellphones.
I've done some simple stuff in it, I'm by no means a Flash expert. But, from what I've experienced of it, I can see why so many poorly designed sites which use it heavily, are poorly designed.
The new Flash they talk about is supposed to have a lot of the navigational elements built in, like scroll bars and buttons. That would be a major improvement, right now, you have to design your own for each project. Even if you do use their built in library to reuse items, it tends to crash too often to make it not worth the effort.
Placing a link between frames, is a major effot. You want a text link to another screen? Define a button (with four layers), and then edit the script for the button to point to the next page. HTML takes about twenty seconds either in a text editor or some GUI nonesense editor. Flash takes about 5 minutes.
Flash was created for graphic designers. Graphic designers have no place desiging sites. Individual pages, no problem, not entire sites. Nothing Flash has ever done, would make for a consistent design within a site. It decreases the usability of a site, because each site you visit which is developed using it, comes up with it's own paradigm for navigation. Sure, within the site it's consistent, but even then, it's some graphic design artist who thinks you should know that clicking the orange flame brings you to the homepage, or some other non-convention they just thought of.
ChuckyG
As a parent running Linux at home, I'm concerned about Macromedia's support for non Windows platforms. My son spends hours on Flash-only sites thanks to Codeweaver and the wine project. I like what flash can bring to web sites, I'd just like to see Macromedia actively supporting the non-Windoze crowd.
Besides that, what about speed? We are not always on a T-1, sometimes on the road we are stuck at 53kb.
Fight Spammers!
Should we be building our web with closed standards? Macromedia owns flash. Once the usage rises, whats to say they continue to do good things with it?
The built in widgets are nice, (hope they are cross-platform) how much does it cost to develop and maintain vs what we have now?
How many really bad flash sites have you run into? I bump into a lot of them. Flash makes some things easy, but does nothing to hide lack of talent.
Blogging because I can...
Aside from the whole debate of proprietary versus free, this would close off a lot of people from having their own web page. And if Joe User did decide to put something up, it would no doubt be even more garish than the abominations of HTML that we see today, not to mention take days to load on a modem.
I guess I'm preaching to the choir here... I doubt anyone here wants one company controlling the language of the web.
- Free tabletop fantasy gaming! Grey Lotus
Is it possible that 3 years down the road we will be looking at flash as a fad of the past? Like vrml and other technologies that were "Way cool!" in their day but got passed off when everyone realized that organizing information in an enviornment overly laced with multimedia isn't a very efficient means of doing things?
I think that it becomes a problem when the technology or in this case the way in which the information is presented overshadows the information itself. When this happens its only a matter of time before people get fed-up having to cut through all the gee-wiz crap to get the information they came for in the first place.
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I think the general idea of using a web browser as an application front-end is a very good idea. Mozilla has pioneered this idea with XUL. A XUL page consists of widgets, plus JavaScript as the control language, plus hooks to regular HTML, custom widgets (XBL), and (eventually) vector graphics (SVG). I'll be interested to see how Flash's product compares.
Of course, Mozilla is Open Source (with a more forgiving license -- MPL -- than the GPL), which is a big advantage over anything Flash will produce.
I don't know about anyone else, but the LAST thing I want to see is a web gone completely flash.
Not only is flash annoying, invasive, and a pain in the ass, but it's not exactly the most user-friendly of web interfaces. Cumbersome downloads, long waits for those on slower connections, and a lack of accessibility for people with disabilities make flash a poor choice for web content, period. And let's not even get into those annoying in-your-face demands that you download this or that component in order to display the latest and greatest flash widgets.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who automatically clicks the "Skip Intro" links on sites that have them, and find other sources of amusement on sites that don't. As for the ones that have the option of flash or HTML on their splash page.. I can't remember ever actually CHOOSING to visit the flash version. If there's no static HTML option, I go elsewhere, period.
We thought the advent of FrontPage was hell.. can you IMAGINE what the self professed "Webmasters" will produce with a flash-based equivilent? Even Macromedia's people admit that people don't know how to use flash to advantage. From the article: The usability argument is somewhat ironic, given that Flash has been identified as a key culprit in bad Web design, enabling pages of blinking text and galloping images that do little more than consume bandwidth. Flazoom's MacGregor said that Macromedia learned its lesson with the last version of Flash, when it began an extensive campaign to educate designers on appropriate use of Flash.
Sorry MacGregor, but you can't train people to have good taste and common sense.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
Personally, I'm looking forward to flash MX. I know the /. community will be down about it, but you only have to look at the average linux related webpage to see that *NIX users need help in the web design department.
Flash has added things to the web that the it desperatly needed, and I think that the whole point of MX is to overcome a lot of the platform / accesability problems. There probably won't be a linux IDE anytime soon for it, but I'm sure that X-based netscape will have a plug-in.
Besides, if your still trying to go to your favorite gaming site with lynx, maybe you should upgrade?
...in related news, Google re-engineers its search clusters to index webpages (flashpages?) based on pixel pattern recognition.
c'mon!
Forms in flash are a hell of a lot easier to make nice than in sorry ass html. I'd show you what i'm talking about but it's likely you cant get to af.mil sites.
I read the article, and I'm not convinced otherwise. Flash is nothing more than a gimmick, and I personally don't want it used at all, let alone having entire pages done in it. The only places I ever see Flash used are on websites that offer no real information, or "Beat Up Osama" movies.
Face facts about Flash:
1) It's hard to keep up to date. Until you can make Flash that updates itself from SQL, it's worthless for any real data.
2) It's not backwards-compatible with older browsers, nor is it friendly to text-only browsers such as Lynx. The flash content doesn't have an alternate of plain HTML & text for those without the plugin (although you can do an elaborate detection scheme which only works 50% of the time)
3) It breaks the standard web paradigm; once you in a flash movie, the back button on your browser doesn't take you back a page, it starts the movie over again! ARGH!
To top this off, recently a lot of ad designers have started using Flash in their ads. Which means animation, sound, a lot of stuff that makes me IGNORE the advertisement and want to DISABLE Flash in the first place.
Also, the only real benefit of Flash, vector graphics, are completely lost in the mix of horrible effects, processor-killing animation, and canned sounds. If you want good vector graphics, use Adobe SVG instead.
On a semi-related rant, I personally am tired of companies trying to treat the web like Television. Even in this article, they mention how they can make web pages like TV. It's a completely wrong approach; the WWW is supposed to be interactive! I don't want animations forced on me, I don't want excessive loading times so I can have glowing scrollbars, I want the information I'm looking for! The web is not meant to mindlessly entertain you for 30 minutes at a time with ads snuck in, it's meant to exchange information. No one can force us to look at ads online, and the more they try, the more we are going to block those tools. If I see one more ad with Flash on it, I'm going to completely remove it from my system.
Assume while using Quickbooks(or any other desktop app) that every time you entered a transaction, the entire screen would take a noticeable time to redraw. No-one would use the product. Flash gets around this problem, and allows the creation of true GUI's on the web. It is a compact vector based rendering engine with scripting support. HTML is far from ideal for e-commerce. At Amazon, one has to click through several screens to complete an order, all of which should be done through a single GUI.
flash as a basis of multimedia is a good thing, though not as a basis for a web site. like downloading a pdf (yeah, i know) or a rtf file, flash is a good distribution device. not to mention that connecting to databases is getting easier by the day through flash. xml is really not ready for dynamic content. though i very much agree with the post that states that the plugin only works in two browsers. macromedia, put up or shut up. and, what are you going to do with authorware and director now?
... considering that Flash is killing the web by effectively blocking content from search engines, making it impossible to link to specific information etc is that Macromedia apparently is giving the developer interface yet another complete overhaul. I'm willing to bet this is going to piss off a lot of web designers, who've had to take time off from active development to familiarize themselves with the revamped Flash 5 interface only a year ago. And if it doesn't piss them off, I'm sure it will their employers. Now I actually *like* Flash, provided it's used as the toy it really is, and I *like* the fact that Macromedia seems to 'get' the web a lot more than Adobe (designing webpages is a *lot* more pleasant in Fireworks than it is in Photoshop or ImageReady), but they should really stop trying to reinvent their flagship product every year. It alienates their support base and doesn't get them anywhere.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Seems like the proposed move from C/C++ based development to something proprietary like C# (or Java, depending on how you look at things).
I foresee problems with stuff like standards (no standards body, just a proprietary company) and licensing issues.
Seems like the W3C just needs to propose something "nextgen" (some kind of toolkit based design like this apposed to yet another mark-up language) to make things move forward, or maybe we just need to stick with the evolving standard stuff like HTML, DHTML, CSS, XML... etc. Just a thought.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
[Truth in advertising - I have written a book about SVG, so I am hardly an impartial observer.]
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is open, works well with other XML applications, and has animation capabilities. See http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG for articles, references, and links.
With a "built-in media player, based on Sorenson Media's video player" we're not going to see a source-available version any time soon. In the past Flash has been a security liability through buffer overruns in the player. There's no way they can be held accountable for them if there are no alternatives.
Executable material in web pages is very rarely necessary. When it is though there's that language, um, what was it called? Java? I hear some people code in that already.
Flash has been one of the suckiest aspects of the web in recent years. Given that it so counters accessibility, usability, cross-platformedness, and indexability, there is no way it can possibly be a good thing for web pages. It is the exact opposite of good for web pages.
There's no smart way of using Flash as part of the web. You can use HTTP as a transport mechanism for your closed Flash application, but you can use HTTP for anything. There's more to being part of the web than being served over port 80.Flash should be thrown out as a web application platform. Just tossed. Don't use it. The record shows that most flash is expensive, bandwidth sucking, usability crushing crud, which is all the more frustrating for its complete lack of necessity. The only Flash I've seen that was not so were animationts where the animations were themselves the content. In this situation Flash is a glorified video codec, and if that's all it was ever used for, things wouldn't be so bad.
It's hard to see how Flash could be fixed. One could open up the format, but that doesn't change the fact that it's sucky for the web. If a site uses Flash in a way that works well without it, why bother with it in the first place? If it doesn't degrade gracefully, then congratulations, you have made a site that throws away most of what makes the web actually useful.
Thank god for cable/dsl.
The big fat problem with Flash is quite obvious. HTML has blossomed (not always prettily) because it is a common standard with freely available documentation. Flash is a closed, binary format and you have to pay big bucks for the Macromedia "IDE" in order to create content. Programmatic creation of Flash using libswf or Ming is useful but can't replace the GUI.
Unless Macromedia releases a free editor for Flash, that's not too crippled, well then Flash will remain a gimmick for those with disposable time and money.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I do most of my home browsing with Lynx on a Linux Console......Nothing annoys me more than a site the has falsh on the main page and no links to get inside. I usually go a google search to find an inside page so I can view the real content.
Why can't corporations see past the web? It's the protocol stupid! Didn't the popularity of Napster teach anyone anything?
So businesses claim they want more control over their user's interface. They want it to be easier to use and more reliable. It sounds to me like they should just create software instead of continually trying to use the web as a development platform -- something it's not good at and was never intended to be used as.
If Etrade or Citibank or eBay *really* want to make any progress, they should skip the web browser and get to the desktop. They beat Microsoft that way. They beat Macromedia that way. They get as close to the customer as they can and they can use http or https for whatever data transactions they like.
What the open source community needs to do is come up with a simple set of tools for building thin clients -- a development kit ( like a visual Java) that would allow lots of developers to go to lots of companies and say, "Screw flash. For that matter screw Internet Explorer. If you want to get close to your customers and own the user experience, make a thin client."
Personally, I would just like the way that would put Microsoft pretty much out of the picture.
____________________
My company just built their entire site using flash ignoring the advice of the IT dept. while the site looks nice it takes a full 10 minutes to load the opening screen on a dial up connection. untill everyone has access to Broadband internet I dont see Flash as a usefull tool for building whole websites
If you plan on doing this you might as well factor two things:
1) You're going to also need to make an HTML site for those who don't have (and/or don't want) Flash installed in their browser, thereby adding to your work/cost, or
2) Be willing to alienate a large number of potential viewers.
If this is your personal site, then knock yourself out. Make it all blinky blinky and shit, you've got nobody to cater to but yourself. However, if this is your business site then you're better served taking that bag of cash you were going to pay the Flash "artist" and running it through the shredder. Quicker, less heartache, and less heartburn.
If you want to get your message out, it's best to do it in a manner that the majority of people can use. And that is our old friend HTML.
To paraphrase Charlton Heston:
"There's no such thing as good Flash. There's no such thing as bad Flash. Flash in the hands of a bad designer is a very dangerous thing. Flash in the hands of a good designer is no danger to anyone, except the blind guys."
Accessibility arguments aside (as I assume that eventually the folks at Macromedia will start to deal with methods for making Flash accessible to screen readers), the major arguments against using Flash really have more to do with the page designers than with the technology.
The problem as I see it is that there are hundreds of ITI-like schools that teach "web design" by doing little else than going over the basics of HTML, then jumping into how to combine JavaScript, DHTML and Flash into the ULTIMATE WEB PAGE!!! which will get you noticed and earn you millions. No attention is paid to the more important aspects of web design, such as: usability, accessibility, size restrictions(remember the "no page over 50k!" design guideline of olden days?), proper layout of information and function, etc, etc. On top of this, the art of code optimization is lost on a lot of these developers, so they do little in the way of making judicious use of Flash -- they basically use it everywhere, for things which HTML could easily do for them.
In the hands of a good designer, Flash can be used to create really innovative navigation methods that reduce the time required for users to accomplish their tasks. The example reservation form linked from the article is a pretty nice way of dealing with online hotel reservations (there are a few things that I found wierd - like how it selected a range of dates).
Overall, however, I see no need for Flash to replace HTML entirely. The design should always be:
Basic function in HTML,
Extended function in Flash,
Ridiculous function left out.
The SVG format does everything Flash does and more. Adobe SVG Viewer and Illustrator, JASC Webdraw have moved to support it and Mozilla already displays it. And because it's XML, browsers that can't display it won't croak when trying to display the propriety format. AND it can be dynamically updated in web servers such as Apache w/ Perl.
Vector graphics are good. It's clear that Macromedia is attempting to secure a monopoly here.
nakhla writes: "This article at [a news web site] details how [a software company] is expanding its [flagship product] to [sell more]. Rather than relying on [open standards implemented by many companies] to [get work done], [the company] wants [its proprietary product] to be used [to replace existing open standards]. [Trust us, says the company, we will do all the heavy lifting for you]. With [state issue here that this product does not address], could something like this be the answer? The article also mentions how [company] is on a campaign to have its [product] [offered even more widely than it is today]."
[Here is some fuel for those of you taking these comments seriously.]
I can. Post the url and I'll see what you're talking about. I've never even seen flash used in af.mil.
Flash is so 1999!
There already IS a flash plugin for qtopia mediaplayer.. but,.. it is version 3
g e.com
http://opie/handhelds.org
http://qpe.sourcefor
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
You mean to tell me that some corporation has the audacity to try to force their proprietary standards and technologies upon the web at large? I'm shocked and chagrined!
Seriously though this will never happen, because the rest of the world will simply say, "Ummm... no." Microsoft and Netscape (back in the day) have already tried such nonsense. Both managed to force a few minor things, but they failed for the most part. And they have (or in Netscapes case, had) a hell of a lot more leverage then Macromedia.
I take drugs seriously.
Try curl for a reasonable client side solution.
mt
You mean something like the combination SVG and ECMAScript (JavaScript).
Well, it already exists, and it's pretty nifty too...
Now if somebody just _used_ the stuff too.
With a good IDE (like Flash) for the designer dudes it would be great!
A pity it won't happen. Macromedia is calling the shots on 2D vector-graphics on the web, and they are happy with their proprietary format.
We wouldn't want any competition in the future, now would we?
It's a shame really, the flash IDE is a great product, if they just switched to a open, xml-based format (SVG-DTD) it would be even better.
But as I stated above, they won't. =(
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
I'm the tech guy on a project to put some Arabic courses on the web. While I understand why our design people (I used to be one... back in the day) want to use Flash for EVERYTHING, it just doesn not fit our needs.
Yes, it looks better than HTML. Yes, it can be integreated with JavaScript, PHP, XML. But two big problems still linger (for us, anyway):
What we do use Flash for is display of certain animated graphics. For example, I wrote an XML/JavaScript activity that can teach how to tell time in any language. Basically, the script chooses a random time and then passes it to the XML for translation into the foreign language, and also into a function that displays an analog clock with that same time.
For now, that clock is displayed in Flash. Perhaps later we will use XML SVC, or something like that. But the key is that we are using Flash as a removable part.
Someone already mentioned braille access, etc. I'll just echo that concern.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
But it works consistently across all browsers. It makes a good replacement for ECMA javascript because you know exactly how it will behave regardless of client platform. That's where Flash is usefull--when you need to target multiple browsers. You don't have to learn which subset of javascript commands works for each browser because the Flash API is well-defined for all of them.
Some may hate to admit it, but client-side scripting is necessary for a good user experience in a complicated website. Most of Flash's features can be achieved with javascript and frames (I know I've done it), but Flash is more secure because the source code is hidden better and is slightly easier to implement.
If only we programmers didn't have to re-learn flash every time a new version came out...
I agree with the original poster. Porting the
player to Qtopia would allow a growing number of
devices to play Flash animations. One size fits all.
My experience is that you use flash when you want people to look at something but you have nothing to say.
Unless used to visual enhance or to help relay your information through interactivity, flash tends to be used as filler.
Who ever decided that you need a flash intro to your site? It's so common now that almost every web developers' price list comes with flash intro - $xxx.
Of course every flash intro must also have the 'skip intro' link so that users can skip what you paid $xxx for them to see.
Come on.
What do you think Oracle would say if you call them up and say "Yeah, I'm using your version 0.0003 beta, and I can't use all of your new features"? They would say "Upgrade you fool!".
Flash does't work for lynx. So what? Are you gonna dump on Macromedia for moving past plain text?
Upgrade or don't complain
How easy is it for me to change content within a flash script/image (what is the correct term anyway?)?
With HTML I can make do with just about anything you can call an editor.
Do I have that flexability AS A DEVELOPER/CONTENT PROVIDER?
Why not develop a new browser or plugin that uses HTML + Postscript + animation enhancements to produce resolution-independent graphics while still retaining easy cross-platform implementation ?
I hear Mac OS X uses Postscript/PDF for its display engine, why not do the same on the web ? We could keep using existing PS tools to create content, yet it would allow designers to better reproduce their 'vision' with a more traditional approach.
Heck, turn the browser into a QuarkXPress-like layout manager. Turn boring blogs into electronic newspaper, that would look and 'feel' natural to the user.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Right, enough of this all Flash sites are crap bollocks. Flash is just the medium. I'm not saying that Flash is perfect for all sites but consider:
/. crowd would be into something you could write once and run anywhere.
;)
(1) Flash is vector based so in theory should look the same on all devices/browsers with a working plug-in.
(2) Flash is vector based so you can stretch it to fit any size screen.
(3) Flash is vector based so it can actually take up less bandwith than some HTML sites to represent the same information.
(4) Flash is vector based so in theory you should be able to print exactly what you see on the screen.
I'm not saying Flash is the be all and end all. Personally I'm looking forward to using SVG with Java on the server but I would have thought that the
I reckon Asteroids was decades ahead of it's time
Go on, shoot some fish!
You can't cut and paste from a flash site. I could see big corporate webmasters loving that (HA! They'd have to go to our site to see our content.), but it would be annoying for anyone who uses the web for research.
Pre-built components, such as scrollbars and buttons, are included
Just like my web browser.
The sooner these bozos go bust the better; 90% of all badly designed websites use Flash, it's good for nothing at all.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
There's screenshots and a review up at http://www.flashmagazine.com/. As for the usability aspects Flash does allow you to extract all the copy and place it in the HTML file so that it may be searched by things such as Babelfish, but at this point it comes out of context. Designers wanting to fulfill this usability requirement still need to develop in HTML therefore making MX useless. BTW, what does MX stand for?
Take it from the expert, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 29, 2000 - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
- Lack of standards in presentation
- Bad/no support for different languages.
- No cut and paste
- Can search engines/robots search them?
- What about dynamic flash content?
Basically, flash has a long way to go before it can even come close to replacing HTML.Every flash site is different, and usually you cannot resize them to take advantage of your screen. Or change font size.
Maybe apache can do this for flash, but if you are really Hardcore then apache can serve up different version of your site for different languages automatically.
At least for text it would be nice to be able to cut and paste text easilly in ALL flash sites without having the author put that feature in.
can google / altavista/ etc index flashfor searching?
Most websites worth going to have almost 100 percent dynamic content.
Check out Orisinal.com, a Flash games site that puts almost anything else I've seen to shame.
Dancing lessons for bears! inflectionDesign
Flash is not perfect, and it has been abused quite a bit. However, most of you are ignorant of its capabilities, largely because you've never seen them used.
First of all, Flash can be made accessible. The latest version will work with screen readers, and on top of that, you've obviously heard the annoying music in some of them -- do you suppose that audio could be used to read the screen?
Second, Flash does have its place. I'm a programmer for an educational software company, and let me tell you -- it's just about the only thing educational software companies are using these days, with the exception of slower, more bloated Macromedia formats like Director and Authorware. It's relatively fast, and the small file sizes make a HUGE difference when content is delivered via Internet.
Third -- the "usability" whiners. No, you can't use the back button, and that's a good thing when you're talking about instruction. Did you give a wrong answer? Well oops, I guess you just hit the back button and do it again -- that sounds like a really bad way to give tests to me. As for "deep" linking, you may or may not be able to. It has been possible to load a Flash movie using a query string that sets variables within the movie, e.g. "marketing_crap.swf?section=FAQ", which could be used for navigation into that section.
Lastly, Flash is open. You can download the SDK from Macromedia's site. It explains the file format, internal data types, plus low and high level interfaces for creating SWF files with Visual C++. I understand that it is not as cutesy as the overbuilt XML-type SVG format, but for many people, that isn't a Bad Thing®.
Oh that old technology that can not even specify a text box to link on, so if your text is "LOOP" and user happens to have the mouse in the 'O' (or other white space) then it doesn't link anywhere because it doesn't register the click.
Oh and what about the fact no "good" open source flash creators are available, can you say "MONOPLOY" (no I can't spell)
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
I disable Flash, even if my browser supports it. I don't need closed standards like Flash on my browser. So, companies that have all Flash websites don't get my business. It's that simple. If the site isn't accessible without Flash, it doesn't get looked at by me. I encourage everybody else to do the same. There already are a couple of companies that have lost my business and the business of my employers over this.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
One step closer to Bill Gates dream of making all web pages packaged into little closed source executables (running under windows only ofcourse). The web's protocals were supposed to be open, above everything else. If macromedia are planning to keep it open, then fine. But if they are trying to push everything into closed, licensed formats then they should burn in the fires of hell. (but they probably won't, capitalist pigs :)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Here is a site that Macromedia is using to tout the power of Flash MX.
It is a reservation system for the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs. I think it is one of the most usable Flash sites I've seen in a while.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
For example, those of you with large screens and Flash might take a look at Jaguar's X-Type site. See that tiny square somewhere in your screen? That's the best use that site will ever make of your screen real estate...
Cheers,
Ian
For example, it's intended to eliminate page refreshes. Users will be able to continue to browse a site even while the Web page processes credit card information and other data
Which means you'll have to wait longer for the page to load in the first place - even if you won't submit a form, beause the info you'll be viewing while you credit card info is being processed must be preloaded. I know - some of you have DSL and don't care about that, but I'm on a 56k dial-up. And by me experience, noone can remember the word "optimisation" when it comes to flash.
As far as I've seen there are no tools to create Flash content on Linux. Am I wrong? I can't see how something could be standard unless you also make development cross-platform not to mention cheap (as in free).
SVG will romp all over Flash
Commercial support: Adobe, GoLive, Illustrator
Open Standards: www.w3.org
Supported: Most know platforms [Adobe SVG viewer for Mozilla]
XML: Same content will XSLT to a search engine, to a PDA and to a High spec client.
What more can you ask for?
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
http://www.hemingwayarchitects.com/
courtesy: www.webpagesthatsuck.com (daily sucker)
...everything looks like it should be done in flash. That's assuming you hit yourself in the head with the hammer first. Ah.... Macromedia. The company that made "skip intro" such a familiar phrase. I come not to curse it, but to praise it.
Flash is great for cartoons. It's great for little games and gimmicks on your site. That's it. End of story.
If I want cross platform development, I'll use something I can commit to: Java, C if it's applicable, C# if it turns out that I have to.
If Macromedia wants to compete with Java, great. Another VM/language combo with multimedia capability is welcome. That doesn't mean I'm going to use it instead of HTML--just like I wouldn't try to use Java in place of HTML.
I realize that as a corporation, they have a duty to shareholders to try and expand into as many markets as possible. Why, if it were possible to crack nuts with Flash they would be remiss in their duty to shareholders if they didn't tout that.
That doesn't mean I have to buy it. Web developers that do are just asking to have their site ignored. If a page takes more than a few seconds to load, and there is an alternative (and there usually is) I hit "back".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have seen the flash "applications" where you play with puzzles, write refrigerator poetry, and even clothe models. But these don't *do* anything. I think it could be interesting to develop web pages that allow their layouts to be overridden by user-configurable preferences. (Maybe XML will allow this? -- I'm ignorant.) For example, you could interactively move all your slashboxes to the bottom of the page instead of leaving them on the default right-hand side. then you change your mind and put them all aligned on the left. Hmmm...this pretty much amounts to turning each web page into a sort of desktop. However the numerous web sites that strategically place advertisements within the page wouldn't go for this.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Well, it's quite clear the the /. crowd has a certain distaste (to say the least) for Flash. Frankly I'm surprised at the amount of FUD being thrown around. There is a point that hasn't been made yet.
What flash does do is let you author once, deliver any browser, device, handheld, or whatever. While standards are nice in theory the reality is they don't exist. If I'm developing an application in html (plus whatever backend) it has to work on multiple browsers on mulitple platforms, with all the bugs and "workaround" that come with that. Sure I can author for a certain subset of that but that will limit my audience more that the use of flash.
It solves the problem of having to load a new pages for each data exchange. Which is (to me) the biggest problem with web apps today.
And it's just as "dynamic" as anything built in java, or whatever. You can hook flash into the back end of your choice. check out espn's new live game tracker for a good example (the old vers was done in Java, why'd they switch?)
Can search engines index information stored in a Flash movie? They don't seem to address this in the article, and if not, Flash will NEVER take off as something other than a tool for graphic design and animation oriented sites (along with ads and CBT). Why publish data that can't be searched for or indexed? Generally if something is not in Google, I'll probably never see it. It's my first place to look for information, as it is for many others.
From what I read, I guess the same tags that let disabled surfers see some content could be indexed by an engine, but does this basically mean that when you view a page, you have to load the flash movie of the information AND the plaintext version of the same information(which would be embedded for the disabled and the spiders)? That seems pretty pointless to me, as well as increasing loading time and bandwidth use.
The server could be configured to find out what browser you are using and send you a lowfi version, if it needed to, but that depends on the developer adding those disabled tags in the first place.
I can see this being used for some sites, but not replacing HTML. I can't think of one good reason why sites like Yahoo and Slashdot, which are about INFORMATION, would benefit from switching to this.
Maybe pay info sites, like gaming sites, would use this because it can make the subscriber seem to be getting a "cooler" experience for their subscription. And it could help keep other sites from just snagging the information and posting it for free.
But this is not mainstream, as far as I can see. At least not yet.
I had a client that was a realestate developer. They wanted a feature on their web site that would allow potential home buyers to browse the client's developments on a dynamic map, and get pop-up information about the houses. The original contractor on the job used javascript(javascript that was created by adobe dreamweaver) to create the dynamic map. Where the javascript solution came up short, was that the client wanted to make frequent changes to the map and the information it would display. The client also wanted this administrative feature to be completely "drag-and-drog" user-friendly. So I recreated the map in Flash, using ActionScript to pull housing information out of a MySQL database. I also created the admin system with Flash/ActionScript, that would let the realestate agent drag new homes onto a map, associate that home with information in the database, and click a "save" button in the flash movie. They loved it. Now they didn't have to bug me, the contractor, every time they wanted to update this map on there web site.
The Flash scripting language ActionScript is really nice. It has an XML parser to import XML data, and also has simpler methods that will let you pass information back and forth to a server side language such as PHP. I really had fun on that project. For a good book on Flash's ActionScript, I'd check out "ActionScript: The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly press. Furthmore, dynamic Flash such as the realestate map described here, doesn't only have to be generated by Macromedia's ActionScript. SWF is an open standard, and there are open scripting languages you can try. Visit www.openswf.org for more info on what free option you have. Flash is great, but a lot of people use it for needless bells-and-whistles stuff, when it can be used to create dynamic user-friedly software interfaces.
Check out my podcast: DreamStation.cc Video Game Show
.. big companies encouraging the use of closed standards nobody else can do anything with.
If Macromedia really want to make the web a better place, they should concentrate on SVG, working with the W3C to extend it and making stuff that supports it well, not writing evil closed stuff and making sure they're the only people who can possibly support it with tools that don't even let you use the clipboard.
Of course, that will never happen, because anyone can develop an SVG tool; it's even human readable. Not something a company like Macromedia want to hear.
As if javascript, java and flash invading everything else wasn't already bad enough...
This is a TERRIBLE idea. One of the great things about html (even more so when done right, with CSS) is that it's a very flexible format - you can take the same html file, display it a million different ways by modifying the css file; extract the text easily; convert it to a million other formats; edit with any text editor; etc... Not to mention the fact that it's usable on any computer - lynx running in dos on a 286 can display a properly done html page. But for most flash, you need something pretty speedy. A lot of flash is slow even on my 850 MHz machine!
Added to this is the proprietary closed-sourcedness of it all...
Count me out.
That said, I LOVE flash - I think it's a wonderful format for vector movies, and all sorts of presentations (www.brokensaints.com is a fine example) but it's not a good replacement for HTML.
I have no problem with extending Flash past it's current use as a simple component. As a proposed fully extensible web-authoring language, it has it's drawbacks (as does any other, to be fair).
My problem is that Flash is owned and (most importantly) guarded by Macromedia. Macromedia has done a lot in the last couple of years (like what AVID did to non-linear editing) to woo many a training college and consultant into thinking that Flash is synonymous with "anything that moves on a webpage", and that it is absolutely *vital* as a skill for web-page creation.
There's nothing wrong with that, insofar as they own it and can thus flaunt it to it's full extent. I worry though about the narrow-mindedness of school administrators and consulting agencies who will eat-up this latest offering as some sort of alechmic marvel and thus insist (by virtue of their influence) that it become a standard in lieu of a web-authoring language that is less hawkishly controlled and more collaboratively developed.
[My 2 cents at least]
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Now that we finally have a more-or-less compatible and standard set of web browsers across the major platforms, let's abandon all of that and start over with another format.
</sarcasm>
Wouldn't it just be easier to extend the exisiting HTML standards to include a tag rather than having macromedia try to wedge flash in?
From what I see flash lacks:
- Uniform Printing ability
- Search functionality
- Basic navigation (forward/back)
I'm sure some flash developers can add this to theirs, but the problem still exists in that a user cannot fully control what he is seeing. For example, a flash site may only want you to see the information in order. When you hit back on this site, it doesn't go to the last screen, but to the beginning or somewhere else.Hey..maybe this is how the media is going to control the web...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
It's "alchemic", not "alechmic" which in itself poses a fascinating discussizn.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Those who like to use Flash: Good for you (better don't make it all to flashy, else I won't visit your page). For those who don't like Flash: Don't use Flash on your page.
But this shouldn't be our biggest concern.
What really bugs me: Where is the open-source implementation of a Flash alternativ?
If in the future everyone (or let's say, most of the non-geeks) and their grandmother will use Flash, will we need to pay tax to macromedia to be able to surf the web?
I for myself wouldn't like that.
I can understand why hard-core, long time computer users abhor flash and I agree with many of the arguments made about Flash.
But we should stop and consider what the average Internet user is looking for from the web. As a general rule, Flash and "eye candy" pleases the more casual user and they find it impressive. It's one of the major reasons why the USA Today newspaper has been a success. From a marketing perspective (and let's face it, most web sites come from a marketing perspective), Flash is the way to go. I think Macromedia's initiative has a good chance at success.
For those sites geared toward raw content, they would probably stick with HTML because the type of audience they appeal to is only interested in raw content. I don't think the Linux HOWTOs are suddenly going to start using Flash nor do I think they will be forced to.
My biggest concern, however, is that this is a proprietary technology. If Flash starts dominating the web, there should be some mechanism to keep tight reins on how Macromedia deploys it. We all know the power that comes with controlling such an important technology and this would be something to watch carefully.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
The debate about the usability and usefulness of Flash is nothing new. Check the Flash Usability Contest at the link http://www.webword.com/flashusability.html I liked the fact that the guy stepped up the plate and used his own money to cover the bet. Surprisingly enough, there WAS a winner. Quake74
Flash is a good idea in principle. I like (in principle) anything that lets you break free from the constraints of basic HTML. HTML wasn't designed for design: tables are for maths, not to arrange things on the page. What we have now is a markup language that simply tacks more and more values onto each tag in order to get it to do what developers want. If I can *design* web sites in Flash, I'd probably be happier.
The huge problem with Flash is it's hugely anti-standard. Macromedia try to defy every standard in the book, as if their way is better, rather than trying to work *with* the browser, like HTML does. For example: scrollbars. People spent years coming up with the scrollbars we use today in our programs, so why should some spotty teenager know any better? The scrollbars employed today are simply appalling. Macromedia's answer to this is: "Flash MX has pre-built page components that designers can drop into a page, allowing for more consistent user interfaces." (C|Net) That's not good enough, and missing the point. If Flash worked with the browser allowing the browser to do the scrolling, that's great. Printing pages, saving pages, cut and pasting, bookmarking. These all suffer from the "We do it best" mindset.
If Flash is to become a serious, *serious* contender to HTML, Macromedia have to change their attitude. They'll need to go to Mozilla, Microsoft et al and try and show them what they can do if the browser works hand-in-hand with Flash, and probably offer to code the enhancements for the companies. Free lunches aren't the dish of the day.
I took a look at the demo site here, and it actually is kinda impressive. However, at the bottom of the reservation system I noticed this:
Circle-C 2001 Webvertising Circle-R Patent Pending
How funny is that if the one thing that actually may make Flash useful (one-screen Web GUIs) would be patented? As if people needed more reasons not to use Flash...
They seem to miss the real problem: people. The reason we have poor Web pages made out of HTML is not HTML -- it's busy developers not having enough time to build good interfaces. Most of the bad interfaces we see are due to poor project planning, poor design, poor development -- not lack of functions in HTML and JavaScript. Expanding flash to be more complex and handle these higher functions is great -- but it'll just mean the same problems -- poorly designed interfaces.
Macromedia wants to be the troll under the bridge everyone must cross. Never mind there's already a hundred free access bridges that are in perfect working order. Guess we need to try to burn them all down to give our friends at Macromedia their rightful claim to the world's network.
LOL, Macromedia. Get in line with all the rest of the wannabe dictators.
As an intern over the summer, Macromedia came to push it's new ideals on us. We were using Cold Fusion and wanted to see where they were going to take it, but the majority of the presentation(read sales pitch/propaganda) was to convert everything to Flash. Also they were trying really hard to push Dreamweaver Ultradev since it "alows you to use all of Macromedias products" in one user friendly environment.
"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire." -- Fred Shero
That's one of the big new upgrades for Flash. Now there's a method of making Flash movies accessible for screen-readers (and compliant with government accessibility requirements), as well as a way to make a Flash movie use the browser's Back button. The big focus of this upgrade is to address all the usability criticisms that have been aimed at Flash in the past.
What bothers me the most about the Internet is that we have accepted it's slow speed. I now have high speed internet, therefore loading pages are a lot faster than before. But you know what? It's not fast enough. For one reason or another we have accepted waiting a couple of seconds for a web page to load. I haven't accepted it. Therefore a web page with Flash taking 10 seconds to load is not acceptable for me. Despite this we are still trying to cram as much multimedia as possible on a web page. I wish people concentrated in having INSTANT web page loading as if I was opening a document in Vim. Well, at least close to that speed.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
I personally feel this is the way to go, but what Macromedia needs to take into consideration, is that HTML support in browsers is a given, no matter WHAT you are using. The flash plugin absolutely needs to be opened up for platforms such as Solaris x86, Digital-UNIX, HP-UX, etc. Currently this is not the case, so the default fallback will always be HTML. Reality is, not everybody is in a pretty MS/IE enviroment, I hope they really push for totall flash plugin compatibility accross the board, for even legacy OS'es.
"True refinement seeks simplicity."
HTML has two important ideas/areas:
HTML both was successful and sucks at the same time because it works in both areas moderately well.
People have worked on improving both areas. The first part, holding content, led to the development of XML, which holds great promise of standardized logical markups. The second part, focussing on pretty display lead to stuff like Java Applets and indeed Flash.
The interesting thing is that Sun, for a long time, didn't manage to provide users with painless to install and use Java VMs, while Flash had no trouble at all providing Flash Players to all major platforms. While Java Applets very often do not work, I can't remember having encountered any faulty Flash presentation yet.
However Sun seems to have woken up lately. Since 1.3, and the introduction of the Java plug in, it has been much less pain to use Java than before. Then there is Java Web Start, which made it really, really easy to get, install and use Java applications. See some demos here to experience Web Start.
This stuff is an example how web applications look like. Note that these apps are no longer confined to a square area in the browser (however even applets benefit from Java Web Start execution, because it is easier to update and version them).
Plus the 2D Api of Java introduced high quality graphical rendering (it was written by Sun and Adobe initially). It has the potential to create better looking graphics than what Flash offers.
But here we have the potential reason why Flash took off, while Java didn't:
As a programmer, I would love to see more Java than Flash. But I believe this is not going to happen until Sun would create authoring software similiar to Macromedia's, that would enable graphic artists with low programming skills to create high quality graphics output, but where the result is not some flash file, but a Java jar instead. This is possible, but would require a definite commitment from Sun. Too bad they don't cooperate with Adobe on this one.
How the hell do I bookmark a page on the site, then?!? I cant bookmark a keyframe in a flash movie!
If you have to shell out $499 for the tools to create web content this equality is gone. The division between those who can and those who cannot is back (no doubt protected by some archaic law such as the DMCA) and once again information is controlled by those who can afford to disseminate it.
Any new "standard" for web applications should be an open standard. I know Macromedia published the specifications for swf but they are hardly obliged to continue to do this with Flash MX. If the net needs a revolution in web application interfaces we should be looking to open standards such as SVG (for presentation) and XForms, not closed standards that are controlled by a single commercial entity.
This is an important issue for any US government website due to "Section 508". Basically, if it isn't accessible it isn't allowed. Guess I won't be getting this product anytime soon -- kind of a shame.
...to the standard right click menu is "Bugger off and never return".
The definition of a clueless developer? One that barriers entry to a site with a huge Flash intro, makes you wait for ten (twenty, thirty...) seconds while it starts loading, fades up the "skip intro" in six point yellow-on-lime, wobbles it around the bottom of the animation for five seconds, then fades it out.
Still, at least The Weekly manages to maintain a sense of humour about it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Developing cross-browser multimedia applications is such a pain in the butt that this is where we are ending up - betting our hopes in a plugin as the only feasable alternative to have the same experience through several different platforms. People like to diss Flash as a little gimmick or toy, suitable only for funny movies or stupid games, put in reality it can be as powerful as Macromedia wants it to be - and it will be, since the installed base grows frenetically. Now that's a smart move - release basic user interface libraries for it. Taking advantage of the mess the browser war left us in. Sincerely, no one can blame Macromedia for it.
-- por uma vida + open source
With websites becoming more and more complex, and the trend to move towards providing web services rather than application software, could something like this be the answer?
The answer to what? The web works fine for me.
$129 USD
Free evaluation version available
From the folks that make PaintShop Pro
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The average person can't figure out how to build a 1/2 ass webpage more or less just use all flash. This is a bad marketing move, personally I think they have a good product and are just getting greedy. All these pre-built scrollbars for people who can't figure out how to use dreamweaver or html. Kinda sad they have to market to the windows xp crowd.
Nyquil = Nectar of the devil
One should not underestimate the importance industry-wide adoption, openness, and transparency of standards.
Flash files are binary files. Hence, their creation, authoring and implementation, rely *heavily* on macromedia's authoring tools, thereby "locking-you-in" a very restricted platform. Such authoring tools may be released for free at first, but easily "upgraded" to commercial versions in a near future. While you can easily author, maintain, update, enhance any web applications whose content and presentation layer are based on standards-implementation text files in a highly distributed and modular environment, authoring of flash files pretty much restricts access to your web application 's components to a single person, on a single computer. Then forget about source-control and revision-control, 'diffing' files for differences. It's all one big binary file.
Flash is a closed standard. Macromedia is the only, largely corporate entity to have full-control over their specifications.
Again, flash files are binary files. You cannot look inside them, re-author them, crawl them, search them for keywords without depending on macromedia opening-up text-only access to content of flash files.
Standards like CSS and XHTML are developed and enhanced to allow an end-user to have somewhat of a control over the resulting user-interface, by overriding a site's font faces, font colors, link styles, font sizes. Believe it or not but yes, there ARE, a *significant* amount of people out there who do have issues with what most web developers call "standards font faces and sizes" and allowing them to override those in the browser is a key factor in making a site accessible.
While it is highly possible to develop bandwidth-efficient compelling content in standards-based web applications, while giving users quick and selective access to the content they are looking for, it is overly tempting to create bloat-ware in the form of flash files. Flash does give you some form of control over an animation's behaviour while it is being downloaded, but a user remains "stuck" waiting for the animation to load. Forget about 56k users. Enter the DSL-only zone.
It breaks the HTTP model, with its derivative page navigation, page caching, history navigation paradigms. A flash file essentially becomes its own mini-browser, its own entire site, where screens are not individually cached, where the navigation cannot be overriden with "back" and "forward" buttons, where any ever-so-small flaw in the 'animation's' user-interface design, is bitterly fellt by the end-user. A whole separate protocol would need to be developed to properly handle navigation within flash animations in order to fully fulfill macromedia's vision. And i honnestly do not thing they are up to the task.
You could also kiss any form of web applications' platform-independence good-bye. While I am sure macromedia is ready and eager to develop their plugin for os x/linux/windoz to work with ie/opera/mozilla/omniweb/navigator, the 'desktop computer' with a traditional web browser is no longer the only web-surfing paradigm. Sites like Google allow you to search HTTP/HTML sites on your cell-phone, while doing its best to "cast" HTML into a "WML" visualisation scheme. It is possible for hand-held device developers to build mini-browsers which understand a subset of the HTML standard, thereby allowing non-specially-authored sites to "gracefuly" degrade on those platforms. Now, what do we do with monolothic .swf binary files?
There are valuable standards being developed and already widely-adopted which allow site authors to greatly enhance a site's usability and appeal with "DHTML" features.
Don't get me wrong, I believe flash is a great site "spicer-upper", but solely relying on this technology within mission-critical and content-driven web applications would represent a real danger to the web-surfing community, which developers at-large should be aware of when deciding which technologies to adopt on their sites. Be sure to *know* exactly what audience you are catering to. *resist* hopping on the "next-cool-whizzbang-nifty-thing" band-wagon.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
HTML Is free. Its easy to learn. You can use a simple tool like notepad to create and edit your pages and do just as good a job as someone who used an expensive WYSIWYG tool.
So how does one go about learning flash? Can you do it as easily and cheaply as you can HTML? NO. You must buy the Macromedia development software. The full version of Flash is $399 and there's no open source alternative. That cuts out a lot of people that make web pages.
I know this may be considered a good thing, because John Doe who makes the pages about his pet dog won't shell out the bucks to buy flash thus eliminating his web presence, but what about the good and informative pages out there that are created entirely for free by people without the $400 to spend?? Flash is not a affordable solution.
That aside, I can think of dozens of reasons why I hate Flash. Many of them are already listed here. I see it Flash as mainly a tool to use for graphics, movies, etc. and all the little bells and whistles that need to be on certain sites. I don't see its practicality for dealing with text and information only pages. In addition, I don't like using it in most cases. This may be due to designer ineptitude, but it makes no difference to me why the page is bad. Flash also encourages people to design things with moving parts, mouseovers, etc. that are unnecessary, just by stressing that as one of its primary functions. Just what we need, more animated crap.
I certainly hope nothing becomes of this idea.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Did anybody actually read the article linked to this story? Did anybody check out this sample page of a online registration for a hotel? The article is not about those idiotic Flash 5 pop-ups and such, but using Flash in a meaningful way. Click on something, the corresponding information is displayed, but, the whole page does not reload! It gives a website the capability of being intuitive, hence productive.
Productive for e-commerce sites that is.
Galeon too. I dislike it almost as much as
you do, but I think it's good to add a
soundtrack to a web site.
As long as people make their sites equally
useful to non-flash users (e.g. the blind), I
don't have a problem.
I really wish they had Flash content creation
tools for Linux...
Mark
check out
http://cavex.avexnet.or.jp/index.jsp
for an example. Sonybank japan also has 2 online-only banking applications that have all-flash front ends (including an interface chock-full of cute little characters who help keep you on the path to saving money).
I don't know if the online demo is available but the real application is functioning and online if you have an account.
sorry, there are no english versions.....
the cute version...
http://moneykit.net/postpet/index.html
the serious version...
http://moneykit.net/
Haveing worked on some of the front end flash code for these sites i can attest that is is possible to build Real, Full Featured Applications with a 100% flash front end and a J2EE backend, and to do it in a way that promotes reusable code and provides a clean seperation between the "prettiness" of the visuals and the underlying display logic. I am a developer, not a designer, but Flash lets me create powerful UI components that look incredibly ugly, and then let a designer make them look pretty without having to worry about them breaking the underlying code. When you couple that with backend technology like java and a database you can make very slick apps that work pretty much identically on any browser that has the plugin.
I think that if macromedia wants to succeed they need to work very hard to port the player to as many platforms/browsers as possible, because the plugin is the barrier for the average user, followed by bandwidth (and poor site design). I think that macromedia could get a big win in this area by open-sourceing the plugin and letting the community at large port it to all their favorite platforms.
-mike c
Maybe they were having a hard time dishing out all that bloated Flash.
Ah, a sign of the web to come.
All products have their place, Flash has it's own place in 'Web Presence' In seldom instances flash adds a nice visual edge to web pages, it's obvious however that flash should not be the principal element in all web pages.
My other gripe is 'Flash' the development environment is a commercial product, HTML is a great standard because it is clear-text, meaning I can use windows notepad or pico to make webpages, or I can purchase a commercial product if I so choose, obviously people would develop other environments to create flash content however third-party applications often lack complete implimentations and are not often as refined.
It looks nice, but as the number of Flash sites increase, the usability of the Web decreases. Remeber, search engines can't read Flash sites.
(owns 25 shares of MM stock)
If a site is 100% flash/macromedia product, how do the search engine bots index the content from the site?
If all of the headers/sub heads etc are vector graphics, then there really is no way for the bots to do the indexing is there?
This question is posed for flash/macromedrivel right now as it stands, not for some future *super* flash.
...but please, say No to Flash, GIF, PDF, etc.
Yeah, good idea- let's abandon a publicly available open standard like HTML in favor of binding ourselves to some proprietary closed-source solution like Flash. After all, why get something for free when you could pay through the nose and be subject to the licensing whims of Macromedia until the end of time? Thanks but no thanks.
Links is a pretty darn good text based browser, it's amazing at rendering tables, etc.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I see a marketing snafu here that tries to justify using Flash by spreading FUD.
Hard-to-navigate Web forms "are freaking people out" and pushing customers away from e-commerce sites, said Wittman. Flash-designed pages and applications will help businesses retain customers and provide direct savings.
I may be reading too deep here but it looks like he is referencing statistics that show a relatively high number of consumers are bailing out of e-purchases at the last stages. I do not feel this is because of "confusing" web forms. It's probably because the site wants too much information, has not shown or has an unacceptable privacy policy, the shipping charges are too high, or the customer has simply decided to browse somewhere else first. Using Flash will not change any of the above. Have you ever backed out because of a "freaky" form?
Another questionable statement..
"I think the challenge is convincing enterprise in today's environment to make that investment," he said. "But I think there's a compelling case to be made there. For starters, it means serving a lot less pages.
How much bandwidth does it take to refresh a page to re-enter some information? If your company is bandwidth limited or server limited to the point that client refreshes are putting you over the edge and into the red, you have far more serious problems then switching to Flash is going to solve..
Want a perfect example of how NOT to use flash? Try downloading updated drivers or information on Pine's mp3 products from the Pine site with a dialup.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Before this rant I have to point out that I have a biased perspective (I'm developing a remote windowing toolkit which works through HTML in a browser see RecipeXperience). Flash as a medium for web applications can only work if a number of its inherent limitations are overcome. but I think these are too firmly entrenched.
Flash evolved as tool which allowed developers 100% control over low level presentation using vector graphics. Flash is inherently low-level. Macromedia seem to be investing large amounts of energy pushing it up-hill.
HTML has proved a successful language partly because it acts as a glue for other content: text, images, movies, audio, applets, flash etc. Like all 'glue' languages, it's not perfect but has a niche because it's useful. Its document centric roots allow for convenient dynamic generation. Far more so than Flash which, as a movie format is ill suited to both content amalgamation and dynamic generation. Including support for scrollbars is dandy, but what advantage does that provide over embedding a flash movie into a scrollable <div>?
Pushing Flash for web applications? Flash would have to become grossly distended to support proper applications - take web email: Think of all the functionality Flash would have to have added to support such a staple web application properly. Printing, displaying HTML content, good support for presenting and controlling lists of data, efficient server-side generation. All this from a file format which was designed to deliver vector graphics?
I can't see how even a company as large as Macromedia could make this happen. Something has gone wrong when a company talks about adding windowing controls to a vector movie format. It's like trying to make jackets by adding leather to zips.
Programmers are need to make magic happen with computers. And if this does come to pass, all that will happen is that graphic designers will become marginalized, and programmers will step in to support the dynamic elements, and ultimately thousands of developers will waste millions of hours trying to solve one problem with tools designed for another.
Programmers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your strings.
For example, it would be quite reasonable to have a tool for drawing diagrams with shapes connected by lines that output Flash. This could be a Visio replacement. A Flash-based replacement for PowerPoint is also possible (and the files would be much smaller).
I once looked into writing a stock-chart generator in Perl that generated Flash. It's quite possible, and would have some nice features; the user could look at different time periods and turn chart features on and off locally. That's an indication of what's possible. There's Perl support for Flash generation, not that it gets used much.
Since the wire protocol is documented, these are good open-source projects for someone.
Geez guys, lighten up. If Flash pages suck, that's the users making it suck, not the program itself. Gimmick? It's far more useful than HTML because it has more programmability to it. With Flash, you can actually create a well thought out interface. An HTML interface relies on tons of service side and client side programming, plus having to re-load to go to the next page. With Flash, you can programatically ask all the questions without having to talk to the server at every step. At H&R Block's site, for example, you have to answer a bunch of questions in order to get a tax refund estimate. That involved a lot of talking to the server.. click.. wait.. downloading, ok done. Or they could have sent down a little Flash app that had the interface programmed into it. The only talking to the server would be in sending the tax information up to get a response from the server.
The page can scale to fit the screen, smoothly. That's another thing I like about Flash is that I no longer need to develop for multi-resolution displays. If you haven't developed a website for a corporation, or somebody who's just really picky, then you have no idea what a headache it is to try to please everybody with HTML in the state that it's in. HTML gives you tables you can scale, so there are a few tricks you can do there. You can even scale images in HTML, but the browsers don't do any kind of filtering, so it looks like a crummy Playstation texture. Flash beats HTML there. It'll anti-alias re-scaled iamges. Plus it has vector drawing capabilities which can be quite useful in nice, simple design without being hard on bandwidth.
Adding little animation and stuff to a page is nice, but I agree that it's obnoxious on some sites. I remember in the early days of the web, people had some really strange taste in colors and dizzying backgrounds. I think eventually people settled into what's tasteful, and that will happen with Flash too. Animation can be a useful interface tool. Remember that when you you are designing a site, you're expressing message to your customer. I'll give you an example, there's a forum I go to where people have artwork that they want put into a permanent gallery. He used Flash to do a bar-chart of the number of votes. To do that with HTML, you'd have to have a program on the server creating the charts for you.
Flash is yet another tool in your toolset, not a cockroach. Yes, people abuse it. I think once the gimmick features of it wear away, the more interesting uses of Flash will surface. It's a broad tool that is cross-platform. If HTML had even some of the capabilites that Flash has, I probably would have stayed as a web developer.
As for you people shouting "Flash sucks! It's just a gimmick!", then I suggest you actually go download the trial version at Macromedia's site and learn what all you can do with it. That way you can develop an intelligent opinion of it, instead of sounding like an idiot.
"Derp de derp."
It would not be at all surprising to see these folks disappear through acquisition. This nonsense of positioning Flash as the next web is probably just an executive level effort to fluff the stock price and generate buzz so they can attract a higher acquisition offer.
Why isn't back a great thing? It is very natural.
- when I don't understand a page of a book, I go back a page and reread it.
- my car has a reverse
- when I drink too much beer or eat poison, I have a mechnism to get me "back".
- my 16 month old daughter knows how to "put it back honey..."
I think it is hard to program for, but that's why you get paid the big bucks.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Maybe they don't believe their own hype?
...but I would say that flash web sites load faster then their non flash html/jpg/gif equivalents. It's the sound that people often imbed in flash that slows down the load times to such an extent. Flash is actually quite efficient in terms of bandwidth, I am not a guru but I did use flash for a while and I will say that it's capable of much more then stupid animations.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Boy, you folks really carry a grudge, don't you?
Using the arguments presented here, I could say that HTML sucks because people are capable of building bad, unusable websites with it.
So... cars are evil because too many people can't drive wirth a damn.
That makes a lot of sense.
If you have a beef with the technology, blame the technology. If you have a beef with what PEOPLE do with it, blame the PEOPLE.
"Daddy, what's Flash and why do I have to wait fifteen minutes?"
Perhaps its time you ditched that 56K dial-up connection in favour of cable or DSL.
For one thing, getting cable or DSL costs $200,000 in some situations, and for another, you can only get DSL from one physical location, whereas you can get dial-up anywhere your ISP has a modem pool. This is important for mobile people such as anybody in college where the college Internet connection isn't five-nines reliable.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I found that the usability of Internet sites is directly related to the amount of moronic, imbecilic turds such as Flash on them. Flash means useless site. When my browser demands that i "up-fucking-stupid-grade" to some mind-vomit such as Flash, I simply go away, never to return. If they were selling something, I make a point of buying in a competing site and e-mail the Flash cretins a receipt from the competition. Otherwise I dont need them anyhow. There is plenty of choice on the net.
Flash normally get's used for awful brochureware (as lampooned in the excellent Skipintro.com) but I think it's best use is as a lightweight GUI for web applications and projects like elearning.
It provides a highly controlable lightweight enviroment that never breaks (providing your users have the plugin). I mainly use it on intranets/extranets as here you know your target audience & this is where more serious apps are hosted anyway.
If authored correctly Flash can be much more effective on a low bandwidth connection than HTML. On an elearning project the flash developer knocked up 30 minute modules that weighed less than 200k! The users on 56K can be interacting with the content as the rest streams down. The trouble is so much flash on the web is bloated gunk produced by graphic artists (with no usability knowledge) rather than GUI developers.
Macromedia is bang on track to make Flash a GUI standard with these changes, particularly as it seems one of the few things that works on different set top boxes, Mobiles, PDAs & Desktop OS's. They just need to make it more accessible for disabled users, what about a version of the player that interoperated with a speech browser?
I think, therefore <iframe>.
The jsp, asp programmer doesnt need to know how that content will be presented.(ie. color, font size etc...).Three words: Cascading Style Sheets.
Can Flash content be made accessible to all readers, even the visually impaired who use a speechreader or a Braille terminal? HTML can.
Will I retire or break 10K?
out side of animated 'shows' I've never been impressed with flash as a design tool or web site enhancement. Generaly the signal to noise ratio is crap, it takes to long to down load, even when on T1 at times. The temptaion for adding nedless crap and 'design' is too great. It often becomes about what the site designer can do not what the contents are. Genreral rule of thumb is to avoid a site if it comes up as all flash unless I know that before hand, such as the latest epp of Zombie College.
HTML by itself is pretty miserable for forms. Its sole advantage is widespread deployment. HTML forms have less functionality than 3270 terminals vintage 1985. To create an app with any significant data entry requires some low-level interactivity of the kind which, at this point, is probably best done with a Java applet (or would be, if Java support in any browser were not unacceptably slow and flaky); you can approximate it with JavaScript, but even there it feels clunky. Any significant data entry app, or data mining app is just painful to use as a web application, because of the lack of interactivity in forms. I wish I knew Flash well enough to know if it offered a reasonable alternative for form-based apps.
On those rare occasions when I do need to see moving pictures on my computer, they are videos, not animations, and should be delivered (preferably as MPEGs) but I can also stand QuickTime or RealPlayer streams in a pinch.
But can MPEG, QuickTime, and RealPlayer do vector animation, or are they limited to a sequence of bitmaps? Without vectors, a high-quality digital cel animation will be an order of magnitude larger, and it'll look blurry when scaled up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Macromedia needs to demonstrate how Flash is appropriate to be the presentation layer of an n-tier system before this will work. They have to go beyond field level validations to be really useful. Do they have a way to make my validations data driven? Can it talk to a database to get the most current information before it goes to the client? How does it handle backend errors? How will it support transactions? Will it support over the wire encryption of my credit card?
Etc. etc.. Also I think that re-using the Flash trademark for this new purpose is a bad idea. Whatever you may think of Flash, it's not associated with the concept of being a stable and useful front end for transactional systems. Flash should be left alone to be what it is, and that's all. Now, if they want to leverage the existing installed based of Flash plugins to trojan in the new transactional abilities, that's another story, but that won't poison their existing customers' mindshare (unless they screw up deployment of the new abilities).
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
One of the senior programmers at my previous job, who is completely blind, uses IE to browse the web. His PC is connected to some strange contraption that looks like a cross between an Enigma machine and a cash register... evidently it works for him. BTW his code is *very* well commented...
I appreciate everyone on Slashdot chiming in that "Flash doesn't do crap! It's ugly", because I agree. Flash is bulky and mostly unwarranted in most cases. What should be taken into consideration is that for every ONE geek opinion there's at least one thousand Joe Schmoes who love their backgrounds that are the same color as their text. They're the same people who used BLINK tags on their site before it was deprecated. They're also the same people who click on the Shock The Monkey banner ads.
The internet is becoming exactly what everything that's creative and stimulating becomes: a marketroid and businessperson's paradise. I know geeks don't get off on bright shiny swirly things (hell, most of them like blue and metal coloured websites), but the perogative of capitalism isn't to cater to a niche group when you can take on the whole world.
Sorry guys, its a market driven Internet.
Read about SVG. Tried to use SVG... installed the giant SVG plugin. Got this message upon loading an SVG graphic:
.
Note: Internet Explorer for the Macintosh does not support JavaScript access to plug-ins, and it does not provide a way for plug-ins to use the browser's JavaScript engine. For this reason, on this particular platform, JavaScript in your HTML cannot access any embedded SVG. If you want to see this problem addressed in a future version of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh, please contact Microsoft
Oh well. Back to Flash.
----
----- "It's all PIPES!" - George Costanza
Back in 1993 when Gopher was all the rage, one of the promises of the Internet was to offer information to a diverse array of people, and to make that information available to all.
I've always been against Flash, DHTML, Frames, and other 'technologies' that serve only to push out those who are fully sighted, have powerful computers, and money from accessing information. Once sites take these routes, it's very difficult to read content without having these factors in place.
Look at _Lynx_! It's so simple to get data using it -- Imagine trying to download a software package who's link was only available somewhere deep inside of flash source?
Keep the web accessible to all, and if you must offer a flash-only site, at least do a browser check, and offer a text-only site for the unprivledged few.
having worked with flash, and asp, and perl, and javascript, and .... as both a designer and a programmer, i have a few things i would like to clear up.
1)Accessibility
Most people, have no problem with both a long winding ramp leading into the bank, and a short flight of stairs. You pick the one that best suits you and your needs. If a designer builds his bank with only stairs, yes there is a problem, but choice is good.
2)Flash is a Tool!!
Flash is a tool, it is only as useful as it's users. It can be used to create very good, nice, easy to use sites. Unfortunately a lot of people have misused this tool. Doesn't mean that it is an evil tool. (that it is proprietary is a much better reason to say that it is evil)
3)Flash is dynamic!
For a while now, flash could make a request to a cgi, or asp page and receive dynamic input! The cgi contacts the database and posts the information back to flash. And, unlike html the flash application does not need to reload. In addition flash can read XML allowing for a non-database dynamic solution that makes use of an open standard. The fact that information can be dynamically loaded (from XML or a database) means that you can set up the plain HTML version and the flash version to make use of the SAME CONTENT!!! Using XML and XSLT and FLASH, it is possible to do a flash version, html version, phone version, low bandwidth sucky browser version, all drawing from the same content. let the user decide how they want to see it.
4)Flash is not HTML
Flash is closer to being an application or a java applet than an HTML page. When I play chess using a java app, i don't expect the back button on my browser to undo my last move, don't expect similar functionality from flash. What does need to happen is that the users of the tool should try and make it clear how to navigate within the flash application. A standard way of navigating in a flash application could be helpful, but we don't even have standard ways of changing preferences in programs on our desktop. flash is not a web page, but an application displayed in a web page.
When will the world learn not to make proprietary systems standards
Dynamic Tree widget for comments. Little + and - boxes to open up those comments below my threshold for the times I'd like to see what an AC wrote. While I tend to agree with you overall, there are features that a dynamic page app could implement that would improve the way I use /. JavaScript, Java, NNTP and others could do it as well.
Bleh!
HTML forms work fine, especially as implemented in the newest set of browsers. What SPECIFIC functionality do you want? Do you want that functionality, or do you want it with no work? Of course you'll need to do things in ECMAScript if you want things to work, but ECMAScript is not that bad.
I'm a fairly experienced web developer, and we've always been able to supply what our clients needed in the way of UI. We specialize in providing end-to-end packages that replace complex desktop apps.
Could things be better, and browsers more standardized? Sure. There are times when we have to standardize on one browser (though the problem isn't form input, it's printing - printing HTML is a nightmare).
Java support could also be better, and I usually don't reccomend it. But if all you want to do is control some form input, it would certainly solve the problem (not that I can think of a lot of problems that are desperately in need of solving). And standards support is certainly good enough to support this sort of operation. Java isn't a good choice for multimedia though, and Flash is.
As far as data interaction, the only place HTML really falls is non-text data, which isn't terribly significant to most businesses (and if it is, perhaps that's another good place for some embedded Flash).
But even if you do want to use Flash to handle your UI (for whatever reason), why not still use HTML underneath and expose it as an alternative. Have a quick look at the hundreds of comments on this story to understand why this is a good idea.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Important Note
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Just went and checked out your link
Only if the question is "How to get me to NOT view your site"
I can't stand flash. I find it highly annoying. A little flash is okay. But when you take it to the level where you can't make any good use of it with a browser that either has no or sucks at flash... Then that pisses me off the most.
Hear that commercial web designers? Too much flash, I go to your competitor. And I know I'm not alone.
'get a real browser' etc comments ignored.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Well, can you?
It's always about, x-browser, x-os compatibility and building web sites that cater to the lowest common/average denominator. What is so wrong with building bandwidth demanding, visually stimulating and more importantly, entertaining, web experiences? Media convergence is around the corner.....and I want to be entertained!
Unfortunately most of what's done with flash is "animated *cough* gif"...
On the other hand the cute flash games that are usually stand-alone are fun and sometimes cool, but I don't consider it web content, even when it's displayed in a browser. Apparently others do.
It's not Developers who are/were screaming out for it, but designers, managers and other non-tech types. Developers are the ones in the back sniggering at the wisdom being imparted, until they realise the designers will be coming to them with "but why dosen't it work? Umm... Your [just] a programmer, you fix it."
I have never had a client insist or even suggest using flash. At most they as what it is. I have however had a client ask to replace a whole lot of flash with, you guessed it, jasvascript and animated gifs (there not alwasys as dumb as they seem).
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
I'll dig more when I get home from work...
Bleh!
I don't see where Macromedia is supporting Palm OS and FreeBSD (native).
/. with. (how's that for a test?)
Both of these platforms have browsers I can post comments to
Macromedia must think the windows is the only viable platform, because they have lots of stuff for Windows. Did Microsoft buy part of Macromedia, and I missed it?
...well other then longer load times and sometimes annoying hard-to-use interfaces; is that I can't use my mousewheel to scroll through text imbedded in the Flash. That's really all I ask for, or maybe even a bar on the side of the text. Most of the time to scroll text you have to hit stupid little arrow buttons.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Designers do everything as a flash movie, and you cannot link to the individual 'pages', only the movie.
Kinda destroys the point of the internet.
Does the new Flash fix this in any way?
We use Compaq Tru64 Unix at work. These days
I often come across web sites that lock me out
because I don't have Flash, and no plugin is
available.
If Macromedia want everyone to use Flash, they
should make sure everyone can.
If they don't want to write plugins for every
browser / OS under the sun, they should use an
open standard!
HA! HAAAA!
I've never witnessed such a massive collection of ignorant dumbasses!!!
Flash ROXX Phuck all ya'll.
ROTFLMAO!
i have been a flash evangelist for a long time now
ever since i decided it was impossible
to use javascript to make advanced sites..
if you wish to check the site i worked on the last months
it's all in flash because we wanted to really give the users the feeling
that it was an application more than a traditional site (which it is)..
http://www.happydemic.com/
all in all it's marketing viral.. but that's another debate
/// evilloop.com
Are they indexable? No....
Are they accessible? No....
Are they compatible? No....
Bottom line: Toy.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Since when has the philosophy of "Keep It Simple, Stupid" never been good enough?
The problems we see in design today isn't with HTML itself, but with browsers and development tools that have strayed from the standards to individualize themselves.
The only reason flash looks like an attractive alternative to HTML is because there is currently only one company that produces the player needed to view this content. About how long do you suppose that will last?
How about companies like Apple and Microsoft, who's media technologies both contain several interactive elements similar to flash? How long until they enhance these players to play flash content, but with extensions to them to take advantage of each player's additional features?
Eventually you'll have flash movies that will either play in just one player or will play in all of them, but will display differently. Does this not sound familiar to anyone?
The problem isn't with the viewers used to present the content to the end user. It's with the developers of these viewers that try to complicate things more than they should.
There is simply no point in creating a standard that can't be enforced. Unfortunately, until we can figure out a way to do it, this will continue to be a problem that plagues the interactive content medium.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I've been seeing posts here that refer people looking for dynamic content to seek out Generator or Fusion, but actually Flash has a nice set of variable-loading functions that don't require installing a server component on your host system. If you can code in PHP or ASP, where it is fairly simple and fast to create database calls to fill up variables, the Flash movie can receive those variables either by POST or GET. Then using a little ActionScript, you use that information to, say, populate a scrolling textbox, or fill a drop-down menu. Admittedly, it's not as easy as HTML, and the actual development style is more suited to movie producers and film students than HTML/*Script writers, but it is possible.
Personally, I'm looking forward to trying out Flash MX just to see their implementation of scrollbar elements -- populating them, the speed of display, etc. This alone would save hours of development time.
The reason why you cater to the lowest common denominator is because you want the data on your site to be viewed by people who came for it. If your site's design is more important than your data, then you are a toy site and not worth considering. You may be a very beautiful toy, but you are a toy all the same.
We're moving towards an XML future, where anything can be dissected and interpreted as the client wills it. This is a leap forward, in that data exists to serve the reader, not itself or anyone else. If it isn't serving the reader, it may as well not exist.
Flash, while cute and exciting and beautiful, is a toy. You can't dynamically create Flash. You can't re-interpret Flash across other platforms to deal with inconsistencies. It's like making your site out of a Freehand document with animation controls. I thought the web was about accessibility of data, with pretty magic artistic danciness being perhaps a distant fifth after instant communication, low publishing costs, and persistence of data.
I love dearly what some people have been doing with Flash, but I don't see much of a future in it- it's not friendly with a world that's increasingly focused on interoperability and interpretation.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
> I bet Google will come out with a "show as HTML" options for Flash sites.
Is that really possible? Is there enough metadata in Flash to turn an entirely graphical oriented flash file into (fairly) plain text?
I doubt Google would be too pleased if the only HTML analog is tonnes of JavaScript and PNG's, or even SVG, which despite it's open nature isn't as accessible as Flash (yet).
That is a sound analysis of the failure of Java to exploit its early start in the same arena in which Flash is now competing successfully. Poor authoring tools plus the proliferation of JVMs. You hit the nail on the head.
The vast majority of Flash authors never would have had a prayer of doing their work in Java, just because of the authoring tool situation. Everyone created Java IDEs for propellorheads instead of tools to let art school dropouts create shiny, brightly colored objects. There were a few people who drank the koolaid and created horrifying animated buttons using Java, but there were very few beautiful little Java widgets. There are tons of beautiful little (mostly useless) Flash widgets, because of the tool.
I think this is a nice example of Geoff Moore's popularisation of the idea of a chasm between techy early adopters and a mass audience. The early adopters like the generality and abstraction of something like Java, with its potential to be everything. A larger audience prefers its tools to be more narrow in scope. Not just easier to use but also easier to understand. Less is more. Flash is now being repositioned as a general tool for doing everything, but its more narrow focus on animation, then on pretty widgets, is what attracted the critical mass of authors that exists today.
here is a comment from http://flashkit.com/reviews/flashmx/ "The Timeline has seen some vast improvements like folders for organizing layers. You can now set anchor points and these can be used to bookmark your project so people can use the back button on the browser, as well as bookmarking where they are on your site." This would imply that you can link to a section within an SWF file using anchors.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
IMportant question: If Flash costs money,how is it supposed to be a standard? I mean, I'm not the one that's going to pay for it just because Macromedia thinks it's the future. I like Flash sometimes, but it's rather irritating, because, IMHO, it sacrifices the usability of any site just because of some nifty features. I prefer well-organized text and cool graphics.
BTW, using Flash with any DB is a PITA.
My scroll wheel does not work.
:) )
:P
;) )
I cannot use my keyboard to scroll around through the text.
Oh sure those features (well at least keyboard functionality) COULD be added to individual flash animations, but why? Seriously now, each movie would have to independently implement these features, oh joy, like that is ever going to happen.
When such features are reliant upon the OS the system works the same across EVERYTHING that is viewed.
Not to mention that Flash is unwieldy when you only need to, say, oh, put up an image gallery. See my site. Simple. It works in Lynx. (I know, I tried it. The tables degrade very gracefully).
How well does Flash work for the handicapped? The blind, those who cannot see well, or anybody who just wants to have a site read to them from their computer while they are out in the kitchen fetching a snake. Yah sure those people ARE the minority, but as digital voice syntheses gets better and better more and more people will begin to use such virtual web page readers.
Of course OCR could be ran on all the text, but, uh. . . After a certain point, you just have to ask yourself. If your web site consists of text and pictures, why in the HELL Would you want to use a delivery method that is built first and foremost around graphic content delivery? That is like saving all of your text as GIFs, and that went out of style LOOONG ago. (Remember when n00bs used to do that? ^_^
Of course Flash can deliver text at a significantly lower size then a GIF file can, but it is still insane. Flash offers nothing to the majority of sites out there on the net. Think about it, how would Slashdot look as a Flash site? This is ignoring that Flash demands high levels of anti-aliasing to make anything look good. (though granted Flash does INDEED look good, more on this later.)
Then there is the matter of screen resolution.
You see the LOVELY thing about flash is that IN THEORY you can scale it to ANY resolution and, besides from any JPEG or other bitmap images embedded into it, the graphics will look just as good. (or bad. ^_^ )
Too bad WAAAY to many FRIGGIN IDIOTS decide to RESTRICT the size of their Flash animations. Oh lovely. Anybody on a 1600x1200 monitor who comes across a Flash animation in a browser window that is hard locked at 320x240 must have such a LOVELY time...
(this can be bypassed of course by viewing the page's source and going to the flash file directly, but it still is not all that nice...)
So one of flash's most lovely features is almost completely obliterated by user stupidity. Lovely.
(by comparison, few web sites place a lock on the size of their main site page, thankfully... )
In conclusion. Flash is overweight for general usage, has too high of a processor requirement for general usage, is platform dependent, requires IDEs to develop in (though I guess if you were REALLY patient. . . . . hmm, Flash was NOT made to be user editable on the text level though, HTML was) and has a nifty "run file on users computer" 'feature' that I really don't like. . . .
Flash _IS_ good for some things. Xiao Xiao rock . But taking 400mhz+ to render a page full of text? Noooo thanks. (ok 266mhz+ if the page is done properly. But you know how friggin EASY it is to screw up a movie and bloat the heck out of the size and kill all performance? Even for still scenes. . . . Flash is way to easy to make a costly mistake in. Bad HTML won't slow your system down to a crawl, though if your browser is feeling naughty it may crash.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
From same article at yahoo:
"Net loss totalled $225.4 million vs. an income of $35.1 million."
At any rate, I think your theory has something to it. This will be interesting to watch.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
This was sent to our tech editing department... looks to me like /. needs a "refreshment" (sic), too! :)
If you didn't think Macromedia were a bunch of tools before, this oughta do the trick.
----
Subject: Macromedia's Writing Guidelines
Hello,
It was brought to my attention that there may be a need for a refreshment on how to refer to our products when writing about them in your books. Please pass this information along to all of your authors and tech editors as you see fit. Please let me know if you should have any further questions.
Here are the basic guidelines:
1. Always place "Macromedia" before each AND EVERY Generator, Flash, Spectra, JRun, Sitespring, and HomeSite. No matter how many times you write "Flash" in a sentence, you must write Macromedia ahead of it each and every time. We realize that this can make for some pretty burdensome copy. The story behind this seemingly neurotic hyper-branding is basically that we don't want to lose our trademarks.
(This is why they say "Band-Aid Brand" and "Frisbee Flying Discs".) For various reasons, we do not have a strong claim on these terms, so we need to remind people (until they're numb) that when we say Generator, we mean Macromedia Generator, etc.
2. Macromedia Flash Player branding is as follows: Macromedia Flash Player 5, Macromedia Flash content. Please do not say The Flash Player, Macromedia Flash Plug-in, Flash (version number) Player.
3. Director is always Director Shockwave Studio, not just Director. Two exceptions: Director K-12 Edition and the special Director 8.5 CD for 3ds max customers.
4. Shockwave Player branding is as follows: Shockwave Player (8.5), 3D-enhanced Shockwave Player, 3D Shockwave content, 3D Shockwave technology, Shockwave 3D content and Shockwave 3D technology. Please do not say The Shockwave Player (8.5), Shockwave on its own, Shockwave 3D Player or Shockwave 3D.
Commonly used Macromedia trademarks:
Authorware
ColdFusion
Director Shockwave* Studio
Dream Templates(tm)
Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver UltraDev(tm)
Fireworks
Macromedia Flash(tm)
FreeHand
Macromedia Generator(tm)
Macromedia Generator Developer's Studio(tm)
Macromedia Generator *2 Developer Edition
Macromedia Generator* 2 Enterprise Edition
Macromedia Generator Dynamic Graphics Server(tm)
Macromedia HomeSite(tm)
Macromedia JRun(tm)
Kawa (tm)
Lingo(tm)
Macromedia
Macromedia M logo and design
Quick Tag Editor(tm)
Pure Pages(tm)
NEW! Roundtrip
NEW! Roundtrip Server Markup
Shockwave
Shockwave Player
Macromedia Sitespring(tm)
Macromedia SoundEdit(tm)
Macromedia Spectra (tm)
Web Design 101(tm) (PLEASE NOTE: replaced by Web Design Basics (no trademark))
"what the web can be" (tm)
Xtra(tm) extensions
There's allways tons of rant about Flash on /. /.ers actually seldom notice if a site looks like somebody used a ZX Spectrum to build it.
/IE 5 (IE was the first to implement CSS in a way that actually worked btw) they're steering hard towards a sort of Animation/GUI-VM. Those lingoesk quirks of ActionScript aside, it could very well be that they'll be even more successfull in the future.
That's becaus bytes come across with HTML 1.1 compliance just as well as with Flash and
The Reason why Flash was so successful in the last 3-4 Years is because Desigers where SICK AND TIRED of constantly dealing with the crappiest HTML 4/CSS implementatinon and browser quirks one could imagine. In fact Flash was the only standard one could rely on.
Up to about 6 Months ago Flash was the ONLY way you could get truely plattform independent Typesetting and Layout across the Web. And sound for that matter.
That's mainly why designers would use Flash. Macromedia caught on and now that HTML 4 CSS 2 is finaly something like usable with NS 6.2
With XML Sockets and upcoming Video capabilites Flash ist about to push Java of the Client Side Web for good. Aside of online banking maybe. But I wouldn't even say that's for shure.
And talking about lynx-compliant sites: That's not what Flash ever was meant for. And no, a Site isn's just bad because it doesn't show well in lynx.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Oh this is definitely AC. I'm not going to get bitchslapped for saying the obvious. Further up in the opinions expressed here, some dork gave a reference to Links. I went to his references, and was astounded by the graphics of Links. THE UGGLIEST HUNK OH POO I'VE SEEN IN YEARS. How on earth can anyone really think that Links is anything but worthless, backwards-falling garbage? Good lord...I can't believe people actually use that stuff!
It's a shame. Director(shockwave) allows you to develop applicatios in a fraction of the time of lower-level development tools, handles CBT superbly, and gives you instant PC/Mac compatibility. What else can compare to it?
It's been glossed over as a valid application tool because the graphics people who comprise the typical user base utilized it only for Shockwave files, neglecting it's OOP programming features and ease of file manipulation, leaving the impression that the web is its only utility.
Java tried this before and it failed. And Java, at least, has things like accessibility support and a real user interface toolkit.
In fact, this push for Flash is kind of good in a way: don't install a Flash plug-in, and you'll automatically filter out clueless and unusable sites.
Having all information transfer and presentation on the web based on Flash would be GREAT! Then, instead of occassionally having 3 or 4 Macromedia Flash download pages popping up when I cruise to some website during my web ramblings, it would happen with each and every website I visited!
I'd LOVE that!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Since this is from the manager of the Flash products, is there an internal struggle in process with the (very hack thing to say) award winning Dreamweaver (and Fireworks) product. Well designed HTML from Dreamweaver along with Fireworks graphics (with Javascript behind the scenes, invisible to most web developers using the products) can do the job quite well.
:)
Where Flash works well is when you want cleanly scaled vector graphics. BUT, the XML based SVG does that better (IMNSHO) than Flash does. (NOTE To MACROMEDIA LEGAL STAFF: THIS IS JUST MY OPINION
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
The most important reason this should be vigorously resisted
is it would replace something (HTML code) that by its very nature is open-source,
and make it closed.
You want to select some text to quote it? Sorry, we don't want you to, and won't let you. etc.
Some people are ugly, and some people look good... if you already have the content, why not make it look better with flash? it's a lot easier to bash something when it's not required. Flash is getting closer to xml and it shows with their last 2 releases
Oh, goodie, what more does anyone need to know about it. If Macromedias "software architects" don't realize how bad an idea this is from a security and privace point of view, they have no business designing any web software. It will be fun to see this one crash and burn.
It's a much more controlled environment; it's much more stable than Java.
Anyone who thinks that their prerelease product is "more stable" than a product that's been continually tested in the field and improved for seven years must be rather inexperienced. Java is not perfect, but its security and applet code has been beaten on so much that one can begin to have some confidence in it.
But, yes, Flash is "much more controlled", in the sense that it doesn't have much functionality compared to Java. However, in the sense of security, anything that can continue to interact with the server after the user has unloaded the page has some serious issues.
First of all, Flash can be made accessible.
Anything *can* be made accessible. The pertinent question is this: how difficult is doing so in practice? When you start with text (as with HTML and XML-SVG) this is quite a lot easier. When you have an open standard with a publicly available RFC (as with HTML and XML-SVG), this is quite a lot easier. When you have an obscure binary format that only works with one proprietary plugin known to crash even on normal input... well making that accessible is not quite so easy.
it's just about the only thing educational software companies are using these days
Which just tells me how backward educational software companies are these days. No wonder computers are doing so little to improve education.
No, you can't use the back button, and that's a good thing when you're talking about instruction. Did you give a wrong answer? Well oops, I guess you just hit the back button and do it again -- that sounds like a really bad way to give tests to me.
Yes, it is a really bad way to give tests, but that's irrelevant. Clearly you can do mind-numbingly stupid things like this with Flash too. You can also do intelligent things with HTML such that people can't undo their answers. This is basic stuff. Have you ever *tried* to design a test with open standards? You don't seem to have thought much about the problem -- further evidence of the sorry state of education software.
Lastly, Flash is open. You can download the SDK from Macromedia's site.
Depends on what the meaning of the word "open" is, doesn't it? A downloadable SDK does not make something open according to the standards of most people here. When Macromedia presents RFCs and at least two independent and interoperable implementations, then we'll talk.
Until then this is just a thinly veiled attempt to pull the wool over people's eyes by redefining common words with marketing doublespeak. This shady business model has been failing again and again over the history of the internet, and it will fail again this time. Have a nice day.
What about dynamic flash content?
why do people keep saying this? FLASH DOES ALLOW YOU TO HAVE DYNAMIC CONTENT!
you can put sql queries right into your flash code. you wanna connect to an oracle db, do your queries or update data and then output things so they look pretty? no problem. you want to use flash with php and mysql to make your sites dynamic? no problem
if you have a quick connection to the web (the site is a bit bloaty... we are talking about flash) go here and click on "tv times". play around with that. then check out how the same thing looks in html.
both are dynamic...
yea a pure flash site is great if the site isn't updated often and doesn't buldge at the edges with heavy sound and graphics.
;)
Www.ClubSoda.ca, the homepage of a popular club here in Montreal, where I last saw Autechre, had origionally introduced a fully flash site, one aspect for english, and one for french (it's a bilingual city). The english NEVER worked, no doubt because it required a huge amount of work to first convert the french version, and then to update both every time (everyday?) changes had to be made, when new shows were announced and so on.
Worst of all, the pages wouldn't work. Scroll bars wouldn't scroll, so I couldn't get any recent information. The page effectively required IE running the most recent flash plugin.
If you go there today, you can see that they've switched to a flash/html hybrid, a reasonable use of flash imo. (The english pages are still not up tho... Maybe they're separatists
Another flash-only page was the Gladiator-movie page (www.gladiator-thefilm.com/ - no longer working) which was so jam packed with flash movies and sound that, while it often looked good, it took a minute to load between sections over my broadband connection. Incredible.
So, my experience with flash is not very good (surpise). Hopefully people who migrate to fully flash sites learn how to design fast loading pages that have functionality across as many browsers as possible. Otherwise they'll have to add a huge ISP bill and a reduced public to their daily maintainence headaches.
Maybe people who are looking for such things get what they deserve?
ac23
I've read so many posts against flash I had to post something. As any artist knows it's not the tools it's the vision. I have seen amazing displays of flash used smartly and pulling data through xml or other means from databases. Flash used correctly can have a smaller footprint and shorter loading times than some strickly html pages that I've seen. There are applications (as in education) that need visualizations to get the point across and flash is certainly more of an attractive way of presenting it than animated giffs!. Not everyone has broadband acess true - but we're talking about sites that use flash intelligently - those site don't try to shove 500k at you, they typically have a small download size and use the fact that the browser has a plugin. Not everyone has IE and a windows product true - but I think it would be safe to say that the majority of hanicaped users who use computers haven't loaded on linux. They are more likely to use flash sites with the addition of features in the new Flash - this is a good thing. I think everyone should take another look at the quality of flash in a developer rather than a designers hands that exists out there today. A bad flash site to me is just as horrible to me as a poorly laid out html site.
This surely can't be happening any time soon. Flash lacks a lot of things that people are used to right now and flash-files get big. Modem-users will lose access to a lot of things if flash takes over. I think they have to solve that problem before anything like this takes off.
rxvt, suse, vi, solaris, debian, java, c, feel the love. #unix@IRCnet, #gimp & #gnome@GIMPnet
Sorry, but MacroMedia's flash plugin for Linux bites rocks - sync between audio and video lacks, and the frame rate is glacial, even on a 700 MHz P3.
Does anybody have a pointer to a GOOD flash player?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hi Ho! Hi Ho!
We're moving towards an XML future, where anything can be dissected and interpreted as the client wills it.
You can't dynamically create Flash.
However, we can pull XML/DB content into Flash and do some pretty nifty stuff this way. This can make for a user-friendly back-end and a pretty front end.
For the most part, I agree with you, it's a toy. But just like any toy (or tool), it has its uses.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
*Insert splash page here*
/. post*
All flash content, well designed or not, looks very much the same in many respects. Flash animations pretty much look and act the same, and there is not much that a developer can do about it (so far as I am aware). Granted, if I want my animations to match the artistic style of, say, The Powerpuff Girls, then Flash is ideal. I know it is possible to break away from that style, but I don't think you can pull it off in Flash itself - and not everyone will have access or $$ for alternitive art programs.
Even though you can break away from the art style , I'm not sure you can break away from animation objects moving "the Flash way." I don't know why, but every movement of an object in a Flash animation moves in a way that clearly looks "like Flash." I'm not sure how else to put it.
Asking developers to desing everything in Flash is like limiting all painters to acrylic paint or all sculptors to bronze. Sometimes it needs to be done in marble, dammit. At least having the option between HTML / XML / Flash / Whatever gives designers more options to get to exactly what they want aesthetically.
Also, standardized UI stuff is only good so long as it can be modified. People who work on making an interface easier to use should be rewarded with the ability to do so, people who don't or who don't care about usability deserve their self-inflicted punisment of a crappy site, and people who have different intentions for the interface (such as a *purposefully* confusing one, for hwatever reason) should be free to pursue this. Again, more options means more flexibility (so long as the user has the appropriate software). Besides, if I had to pick ONE standard, I would go with W3C stuff because it gives me more control over content and presentation that Flash does.
*Fade into next
Why even bother debating the functionality of using Flash like this? They just want to sell the product.
No sig for you!!
I tried to make many things in Flash and had to give up. That product is made for designers and not web developers.
For example try to make a drop down menu in Flash.
CSS, JavaScript and HTML / PHP, ASP is the way to go if you want to make something good looking and usefull.
Flash is very cool for presentations and don't want to say anything bad about it but its business strategy usefullness is low.
Too bad the flash plugin has been crashing my mozilla lately.
I disagree: they need to create versions which display anywhere. This was what HTML was meant to do. This is why it is, even now, mostly structural markup.
I agree with you that HTML is structural markup, but how do you create CSS that will work well on all devices now known or hereinafter developed?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Oh yipee. Now when i want to read some pages of text, not only do i have to load graphics, ands and all that crud but ANIMATION AND SOUND as well! Seriously, there is no way this is at all a good thing. And how am i supposed to browse with lynx then? All the best pages I know are not the flash-infested ones, but the nice simple ones. IE. google
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
I am a big Abit fan and I visit their site fairly often. When I do, I always have to take a moment to throw up into my wastebasket as the Flash menu bar comes in.
It is a terrible part of the site. It is the last thing on the page to load; its hot spots are insane; it is a monstrosity; and of course it doesn't work with all browsers. Abit should have their head examined for putting it in.
Flash: it is for more than making a spectacular piece of crap, it can also help make a nonintrusive piece of crap.
If you mention that Taco's declaration was a piece of crap, you might get bitchslapped ! 8-D
Even though web browsers are where Flash/SWF is utilized the most, there are many other uses. SWF works and looks great as a kiosk front-end (because it is scalable with smooth edges and fast). It can be used to render binary vector prior to printing, (SVG and VML are not there yet). It can be used to render vectors and PNG into bitmaps. And, the player by Macromedia and movie can be embedded directly into a C/C++, VB, .Net binary, making both movie and player transparent to the user (one exe/ocx/dll can contain the movie and player). These abilities are also available on many non Windows OS's.
I do a lot of development around Flash and SWF. And from experience, it is a much easier model to use than Director and it has far better support than VML and SVG.
Many /. Readers may not realize that Flash and SWF are not exactly the same. SWF (Shockwave Flash) is the binary file format. And Flash is the authoring tool which produces SWF files. While the Flash tool is not opened, the SWF format is. And many developers have done great things with it. Visit http://openswf.org . And even Adobe (the SVG people) has built an authoring tool to compete directly with Flash called Live Motion.
An open source SWF Player is also available on Linux at http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash. And a open source SWF generator is available named Ming.
As for SWF competing with HTML, I think it already is, and will continue to for a little while longer. But I don't think SWF's will be taking HTML's place anytime soon, if ever. It works best when used side by side with HTML or in applications.
I don't see there being any moral imperative for someone to create an accessible site (meaning caters to a few specific groups), especially if their products or services aren't particularly of use to thsoe who are blind. Why is there such a trend (with occasional goivernment support) to force people to accomodate the blind? A lot of people have some kind of disabling illness but don't get the same benefits as blind or deaf folk. In my experiences, nobody ever seems to question why. If blind people need access to something, how abotu obligating companies to, say, providde a phone number with a person on the of the line for the blind person to talk to, rather than ask them to reengineer their web site?
Before you respond with `how dare you question that we must be forced to accomodate disabled people' please remember to provide a supporting argument of some kind.
That Java applets don't?
I'm serious. I've yet to see a flash site do
something that couldn't be done using Java applets.
And while Java is hardly the most open of platforms,
Flash isn't either, and at least it seems to run on most platforms.
- MugginsM
The Flash Generator automatically duplicates all the Flash text into HTML text so that Google can find it.
It also puts the text inside comments, which the search engines ignore. It also repeats text over and over if it appears on multiple frames; search engines' anti-spam heuristics ignore text that's repeated too much. (I found these problems on animutation.com until it changed over to Newgrounds hosting.) And there's no way to get that info from the swf itself.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So we end up with a handful of propitiatory formats on the web ( flash, *net )? Then who is in control of our content ( and underlying OS )?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, I do enjoy Flash/Shockwave.
I do, however, detest the gratuitous use of Flash. It seems most Flash designers use the "Baffle them with Bullshit" design approach. Many clients fall prey to the stupidity.
Don't blame Macromedia, blame the designers who bypass practical uses of the medium and the clients who buy it.
Try doing that with HTML. The company is making money, doing exactly what this article is all about. Build a website by dragging components around the page rather than having to faff about with HTML designers and uploading your finished HTML code.
There is going to be Flash MX development tools for unix users. They're releasing Flash MX for Mac OS X.
Your comment's reasoning implies that Mac OS X counts as a UNIX system. Mac OS X is not a UNIX® brand system.
Grandparent meant that Macromedia Flash has not been ported to any Linux, *BSD, HP/UX, or Solaris operating environment, or any other environment that uses X11 as its graphics layer. Many web developers like to develop on a system known to share some behavior with the production server.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why not develop a browser plugin that acts as an X server, which executes the code on the server but displays in the client browser using the X network protocol. Seeing as we're all wasting our bandwidth anyway. Imagine little applets like xeyes, now imagine them as plugins in your browser. It would also be an open solution. In fact, I do not think I am inventing this idea, I think I read about it on the X Consortium (well whoever took over) page a couple years ago. I don't know what ever happened to it, but I think it would be a good idea once bandwidth is officially deemed plentiful. I can run small programs like xeyes remotely over cable just as though it were running locally. Even real apps like netscape can be used, though with slight delays when you click menu items and things.
Partially sighed people will/should have screen zooming software. Blind people will be just as stuck as they would trying to read a newspaper or watch a movie.
You can zoom in on a flash applet if you want to increase the font size. Or buy a bigger monitor. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that making a flash site easier to read (by zooming in) for a partially sighted person is *easier* than an HTML page - change the font size in IE and everything looks all wrong. OK, so Opera's zoom function is more effective, but hey...
If everything was tailored to blind people we'd have no highways, information or otherwise.
Go look at some professional sites instead of hanging around geekboards.
Except that the most popular commercial sites (Yahoo, MSN, Google, Amazon, etc) don't use it. Among the most popular commercial web sites, only the movie brochure sites (the matrix, the time machine, etc) use Flash to present the main content, and I find their navigation frustrating, not to mention their performance over a dial-up line.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What major feature is GIMP missing that Photoshop Elements (i.e. Photoshop without prepress) has?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Absolutely right. I am on a cable modem, and I am under 200 milliseconds away from the entire US web, with upwards of 1 megabit of bandwidth. Using HTML I should be seeing the first page of text load up within 300 milliseconds of hitting a link, which is close enough to be considered instantaneous. The rest of that first page should follow within the first second.
There is no public site that I have seen achieving this level of speed. Yahoo is as good as it gets and they generally over take a second. Why? And as you note, Flash sites are always worse than the most responsive HTML sites because they never give you anything but "please wait" until the initial 100+KB chunk of movie is loaded. That alone disqualifies Flash.
[commercial web designer] : Oh boy! we're so sorry mister fire-eyes! If only we'd known! And now our biggest customer is going to have to file for chapter 11 because we lost your order!
[fire-eyes] : heh-heh - that'll teach you to use too much Flash sux0rs!
What were your going to spend all your bucks on? A new 16K ram chip for your C64? Looooser!
Flash 6 supports compression, which should make flash sites load about twice as quick (try gzipping a .swf file sometime).
God knows why they haven't done this before. I tried setting up mod_gzip for it, but there are just *so* many random browser problems that it's unusable on a commercial site.
If you hate 'back' so much, then how do you expect users to get back to Slashdot after reading the JGenerator page you linked to?
Will I retire or break 10K?
So much for a working Mozilla. Since when did a 0.x version of Mozilla on Linux become the reference standard for Web pages?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
nbsp; Most technical schools are training their students to use flash and other web development products to create web pages. This allows for the more 'creative/graphical' person to venture onto the web without having to be extremely well trained in HTML and complex tables. I've seen some excellent webpages be produced by people who barely know how to turn on a computer but have lots of creative vision.
Flash can loadVariables from the server (in URL-encoded format), get XML from the server, or be generated on the fly (macromedia generator, Ming and friends). You can get these variables and update the display without having to load in a whole new page (like you do in HTML).
OK, so flash is used in many "intro" situations. So were animated gifs at one point, and all those meta-refreshed splash pages we used to get. Good flash can be smaller in file size than an equivalent HTML site - those vector graphics can be shrunk pretty small, and with flash 6's compression support you'll see files halving in size.
Face facts - the web isn't just about information. It is increasingly being used for entertainment, and more and more non-PC platforms will be using it as time goes by. Flash is also an excellent tool for building good-looking custom UIs for things like set top boxes (program guides at www.liberate.com), mobile phones (whole interface in www.pogo-tech.com), PDAs etc etc.
Oh, and without the ads the internet would have disappeared long ago. Or maybe it'd just still be grey, like it was in the olden days.
No, in the same way that an iframe is useless to anyone who doesn't use IE.
Are you claiming that Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only popular web browser that implements iframe, which is part of the HTML 4.0 standard?
Will I retire or break 10K?
You must be kidding. Science magazines use it to display peel-away views of working hydrogen engines. News magazines use it to allow you to explore the cave bunkers of Afghanistan.
I think you're mistaking the UI designs some Flash developers come up with with the medium itself. Some people do use if for "film loop" type displays, but they always have the choice to provide random access UIs.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Hello out there . . .
2 /flash_mx_accessibility.html
The majority of you are so busy trashing Macromedia Flash because it does not allow for accessibility to Flash based content by the disabled community. You are wrong. Let me just repeat that:
YES! YOU THE GREAT SLASHDOT POSTER ARE WRONG!
Flash Player Plugin Version 6.0 provides accessibility for the disabled.
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/200
The link is located on the Macromedia home page, directly below the link for the Flash MX release. I really wish the Slashdot community, who I mostly respect took the time to some quick research before shooting there mouths off.
Now if you want to complain about Flash eating up the bandwidth and the content/art looking like crap, that is another thing all together.
Macromedia would like that, wouldn't they. Instead of people using notepad to create open source webpages, they want people to create closed source pages with a $199 product (all profits to Macromedia, BTW). And this would be the "Web" standard? Please!
I don't see this happening. Flash websites are not only annoying, but you have to learn a whole new medium to be able to create flash pages. Almost always, the usability of the website sucks based on the navigation "programmed" by the webmaster. They aren't dynamic, don't use databases, and requires the user to download a plug-in for their browser (lets hope they never add spyware into that thing).
I think if we will ever have to evolve into a different type of medium for websites, it would be W3C's SVG format. Parts of websites in flash is good, websites ALL in flash is bad.
There's actually a yet more useful bug request out there to get flash blocking on a per site basis, just like there's image blocking on a per site basis.
Work on it seems to have halted for a while though, but maybe that's cause it's really more a specific instance of the general case of being able to block any multimedia content from any site.
I just hope this'll be picked up soon, since the flash banners have gotten really bad nowadays.
would this cause the search engines problems when trying to index websites if they are no longer done in HTML?
also I wonder about the name Flash MX...is this another johnny come lately to the Bill Gates School of Product Naming: Windows XP, Athlon XP, Flash (err) MX
P.S. I'm currently on page 218 Chapter 8 of The Flash 5 Bible
Anyone remember when the great premise of the internet used to be equality?
No. I remember when the premise was that if you were technically skilled, you could participate. If you were an artist, you were out of luck.
Anyone with a text editor and a net connection could stick up their own site, leading to a golden era of communications and freedom of information.
What are you imagining? You can still fire up the old text editor and produce amateur-looking sites. Nobody's going to pry your vi out of your hands. And if your site has the right information, nobody will care if the presentation is amateurish.
It's just that now that the affordances of the medium have expanded dramatically, the artists are gaining an advantage over the techies in some ways. Real professional production values are becoming possible, and those who don't have the talent to create professional-looking visual media are going to have to collaborate with those who do or just stick to text-only sites.
The pros who create things like movie special effects, primetime TV dramas, glossy magazine art, and high-production value websites don't whine about $499 tools. If you're not operating at that level, nobody has taken anything away from you by providing tools to those who do.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Thank you for making my point for me -- HTML alone isn't enough if you need to supplement it with ECMAScript, JavaScript or something else that *isn't HTML*. Specific functionality I'd like? I'd like to be able to display a master-detail form, where the detail records show in a scrolling sub-window, and the visitor can edit a field in one row in-place, and commit the change. HTML just isn't designed to do this without a lot of round-tripping of the master-detail display, as well as requiring separate forms for sub-record work. Oh yeah, I dare you to do it in a way that doesn't tie itself in to a specific browser. You, fairly experienced web designer that you are, may reply that people should use standards-compliant browsers. There's a bunch of Lynx fanatics waiting to beat you over the head with their text-only displays. (By the way, folks used to do UIs like this in curses all the time before the web came along, so it's not a matter of text-only versus non-text.)
HTML forms are only good enough for forms UI work if you don't demand much of your UI. You can't provide a fluid interface that really takes advantage of the bandwidth of the human-computer interface if you're constrained by the limits of HTML forms. I have no idea if the new Flash will be able to do this either, and God-willing, I hope I don't have to find out. I'm not knocking HTML, either -- it's fine for what it does -- rather, I'm knocking your myopic assertion that HTML is "well-suited" to forms. You want to see a really good forms app? Try a spreadsheet like Excel. No, I don't want to write anything in Excel, but if you want an idea of what forms UIs should aspire to, there it is. You can't get anywhere close to this level of fluidity with HTML, even if you include JavaScript. People can take advantage of much more interactive bandwidth than you can give them with HTML. Any designer who asserts that HTML forms UIs are just as good as desktop UIs is either working with really crappy desktop UIs, or doesn't know much about human perception.
Do I do most of my UI work with HTML forms? Sure, but it's a marriage of convenience, because I can deploy to my customers quickly, and not worry about platform issues as long as I stick to a low denominator. If I wanted something better, I'd probably have gone Java or Tk, but if Macromedia is serious about this, Flash may be a contender.
I'm suprised no one has brought up the cellular/wireless argument against this: with open standards, anyone can build a viewer. As much of a train wreck as WEP is, at least it's open.
... Even PDF with reflow is more usable than Flash on a PDA.
Even if Flash were open spec, though, cell phones, PDAs, and other wireless systems (blackberry, anyone?) wouldn't be able to support it, due to insufficient CPU time, battery life, RAM, screen quality,
As a web designer, I would hate to see Flash essentially take over the web. I've never found a use for Flash other then for splash pages and cartoons. What I really hate about flash is that it can't be edited from anywhere, whereas you can do HTML in notepad, pico, or even DOS Edit if you wanted to. I don't want to have to drag Flash installation CDs around with me everywhere just to keep my website current. Also, adding content to a webpage for me is a simple copy and paste to create a new section for my comment/rant of the day and/or using a template page and filling it in. All text and typing. I've never really used Flash for content, but I imagine it must be somewhat more difficult then just simple typing, followed by CTRL-S, or File, Save or whatever.
I think Macromedia should stick to what people use Flash for, and not what they want it to be used for. Make it easier for animators to produce cartoons (a la All Your Base or joecartoon.com) or to do simple drawings and export them as jpeg. A friend of mine is working on a web project with me and he uses Flash to make some pretty nice buttons and drawings and whatnot. In jpeg.
You're right, you're going to need a newer browser to do a good detail screen.
Well, people should get a new browser IF they want to have decent UI. People are going to have to get one sooner or later. And you can't do a real nice detail screen in Lynx (although you could if its scripting system was up to standard - I don't think it'll ever run Flash). And the form I end up writing will still be available in German via Babelfish.
And even if you write a screen in Flash, you're going to have to write it again for people without Flash - or am I the only one who has to serve everyone?
HTML allows you to scale gracefully with the abilities of the browser. This can be hard. But it's worth something. And if you only want to write stuff that will work with newer browsers you can (just like you can write sites that will only work with Flash).
And really, there just isn't a lot you can't do with script - as long as you're willing to go the distance. I've seen Spreadsheet type programs written in script. Again, I don't know what UI features you're looking for.
We've implemented a lot of detail screens with fancy drag-and-drop crap. Sometimes we've had a couple more round trips than we wanted, but usually it's a situation in which Flash wouldn't help anyways (situations due to lack of data on the client side/way too much to send at once).
Support for all the UI functions you need IS in the standards.
Disclosure: For most of the apps we do, the users are mostly client employees and can be forced to upgrade.
Also, right now I write applications that serve many different clients. I can put form code specific to a client into the database to be added to the form on its way out. One client can get a pretty much completely different UI than another, with no code specific to them. Good luck doing that for a hundred different clients with Flash.
Sure there's going to be times when you have to resort to Java or Flash to get a form the way you want. And HTML could be a lot better. But it has a lot to offer.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Flash is a very capable and useful tool in the right hands. An object oriented approach can produce amazing, fast, re-usable components for building useful sites quickly. And once the flash app is loaded initially there need be no reloading of pages, reloading of cgi prgrams etc. It can be a continous free-flowing application(very enjoyable by a user) that can quickly retrieve data from a back-end through a variety of methods, including xml or socket connections. Don't compare early flash done by graphic designer to flash done well by coders with strong OO backgrounds. Early HTML design and development was by no means perfect at the beginning. If flash was truly useless or pointless eye-candy it would have died long ago with the blink tag. But innovative people continue to do amazing things that are impossible or clumsy with HTML/CGI devlopment.
We're talking about a transition from click-reload-click-reload to an authentic GUI interface for on-line applications.
Yes, the 'developer' interface isn't obvious right away, but a few tweaks here and there and you can easily notch out a well organized coding interface.
The next version is working on some problems brought up here, but some people are so ignorant of flash's capabilities it astounds me they have the confidence to even make a statement on the matter.
I'm not exactly saying that an all Flash site is great, but as far as accessibility is concerned, that is the designer's problem. And last time I checked most of the HTML only sites I've been to haven't been totally browsable for people with disabilities.
Second, you may want to make your site viewable to as large an audience as possible, but in the end you exclude some no matter how hard you try. They give the stat that 98% of browsers have the Flash plugin. Anyone have figures to dispute that?
You will get yourself in a sticky situation if your navigation is based on flash and someone doesn't have it installed. They really need to make a detection scheme that will redirect a browser to non-Flash elements if the player is not installed, that works 99.44% of the time. Hard to do, but that would help alot. It would allow the designer to use Flash and provide a backup.
Always keep to the motto of KISS though (Keep It Simple Stupid) Unless you NEED Flash for something avoid it. Don't try using DHTML to do similar feats thoguh, ugh what a mess that is.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Just in case anyone was doubting your statistic, Macromedia has a breakdown of Flash adoption stats at http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/f lashplayer/. They say their penetration is 98.3% of the browser market as of 12/01.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Great, so now when I do the immediate "skip flash" that is now ingrained in me, to skip the stupid fluff, and get to the meat, I'll end up skipping entire sites. :-)
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
is not done entirely in Flash. They use HTML content in addition to Flash emphasizing the point that Flash is useful for certain things and not others.
Here's some other stuff Macromedia needs to do to Flash to make it better:
1. Fix XOR. Currently, it is unreliable, which is amazing, but true.
2. Fix the string handling. It is unbelievably slow. This is a known issue, so hopefully they're on it.
3. Generally be better than Javascript.
4. Introduce native encryption support for XMLSockets.
A fair number of people have been complaining about this stuff, so let's hope it gets fixed.
Lets face it, most web designers are a little bit... cough... well lets just say they have a gcse in art.
If they see that they can make their entire client's site in flash, then that is what they will do. It will probably be closed source, and terrible for anyone who filters their html for banner ads, or uses brail etc.
So, what we have to do is take these people and give them a slap on the wrist, saying "NO" and then put them back in front-page (or whatever stupid software they use). I like html because, as a user of a web page, it gives me the power to control how that page is viewed on my computer. I can configure my browser so that fonts are bigger, background colours are ignored, opening new windows is barred etc. i can even use a proxy to take out things i don't want, like banner ads. Its probably still possible to do this with flash, but it gets allot more complicated.
Technically, i am just a guest on the web site, and the designer has the right to do whatever they want (just like the mpaa has the right to sell plastic disks for rip-off prices).
As usual we just have to stand up for what we want, and say "no, dog, get back on all fours and code your site in html, you pig, your lucky i'm not making you do it in html 1.0, you cretin designer, you should be working for dog food, now don't let me catch you with any of that 'i'm a **** so i'll make this link open with java' witchcraft or i'll make you do the whole thing in vi!"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
it is the only thing that can slow down
the speed of light.
Sux and badly.
Had one guy ask me why his web sites never got into the search engines and why mine were always on the first page of search results despite him trying to "submit" his sites multiple times. I've never "submitted" a site to a search engine.
The pages are about much the same stuff. When I looked at his sites, everything was flash and javascript linking while mine simply provide *useful content* with relatively vanilla HTML. When I told him this, he looked at me like I didn't know what I was talking about and insisted that I must have some secret tags which the search engines use. I don't even use the meta description tags.
As a result, my pages get 10 hits for every one his get.
Some people are just too dumb to give advice to.
Deleted
have you ever coded some javascript ? there's nothing on this page you can't do in javascript. and i mean STANDARD javascript, not some IE extensions or whatever.
:)
* JS is cheaper to code & maintain (you can even maintain it with a server app !)
* standard JS will work everywhere
* JS will actually be FASTER than flash !
if this page really shows what flash is really good for, i'll merely go back watching some cool useless flash. useless and beautiful, that is flash ok
For chrissakes; he had three points and I was forced to make up whatever it was I could to refute his third point
You could have "granted" part of his argument.
Can you really blame me?
I wouldn't have blamed you had you used "primary" instead of "only" in your argument. I was pointing out that "only" isn't entirely correct.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Umm.. Are you suggesting that every company go around the web browser, and return to client/server computing by requiring a local app that connects to a central server via PROPRIETARY protocols to exchange data?
Actually gotta hand it to Macromedia, they've been quite successful getting their 'flash client' installed all over the place. But like everyone else who frequents slashdot, I find flash a waste of bandwidth and website developers' time.
If your site doesn't work in a text browser, I'm not going to see it. If you only use flash, and don't develop a standard web site as well, you might be in trouble.
Wow! what an idea! I thought that the whole internet buzz was all about burying client/server architecture...
personally, i am kind of fed up with flash. i leave the flash plugin uninstalled and generally just ignore all-flash sites.
"The article also mentions how Macromedia is on a campaign to have its Flash plugin included in all Internet-compatible devices."
Excellent. How about a plug-in for Lynx? How about for FreeBSD's native Mozilla? How about releasing some *source code* so we can compile native FreeBSD flash?? FreeBSD is certainly an "internet capable device"; we'd love to have Flash!
- tomRakewell
Yup, that's what I call "Accessibility".
Seriously, if they can't make it acessible for a normal, able-bodied person like myself, why should I believe they'll do a better job for the disabled? Don't get me wrong, flash has it's place, but that place is definately NOT as a replacement for HTML.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Listen mister "even on a 700 MHz P3", just because you are a luddite who does not use the word gigahertz when describing his computer doesn't mean that the rest of us have to stay in the bad old days of postage stamp video and black-on-grey. And in case you can't tell I'm being sarcastic.
Good points, but when exploring financial information in a spreadsheet, I don't feel the need for a "back" button in Excel. There's no back button in a textbook.
I agree about the desirability of obviousness in a UI, but what is obvious varies depending on the information and medium. Flash could allow you to create a more obvious UI for certain types of info than HTML pages, where pages just aren't an obvious metaphor.
Flash can also make the information a little easier to "digest", if presented well. I've seen it presenting stock info driven by live data feeds from behind and found it fascinating to watch. Data driven moving graphics manipulated by UI elements that just aren't a part of HTML.
I think you're probably right about making the whole science mag a single Flash movie versus embedding Flash in HTML, but I also think that we'll see more interesting "application" sites that don't resemble sequences of pages at all, and Flash should be excellent for some of them.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The fact that Macromedia wants to do the entire site rendering process is not at all appealing to me. You can't reasonably create Flash without a several hundred dollar package (Macromedia's or Adobe's). The learning curve is also quite high, and it is harder to generate programmatically than plain text-based XML/CSS content.
I can see from a business perspective why Macromedia would want to displace HTML/XML/CSS with their own product, but I don't think it's really to the benefit of the web community. I don't want the web tied to Macromedia's whim anymore than I want it tied to Microsoft's.
XML/CSS and their derivatives (like SVG) provide us quite a bit of flexibility -- except for free. These tools also allow you to maintain documents rather than simply animations. There's a lot of options with XML, ECMAScript, CSS, etc (including interactive animation). There are good times to use Flash, but Macromedia's move to take over disturbs me.
And unless they have done something drastic, there are a lot of fudamental problems with using Flash site-wide. Search engines don't really grok it, and you can't bookmark or email specific pages. This is the same problem frames have. Flash is good in certain contexts when used in conunction with XML/XHTML and CSS. Flash as a replacement for these seems like bad news for everyone except Macromedia.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Looks like I win again! LAST POST!
I can't believe your answer to this is to get a new browser. Shoehorning all of the specialized UI functionality you need into a browser is a great way to add needless bloat. Repeat after me: The browser is not the only UI tool in the world.
Again, you're trying to tell me how HTML solves all your problems, and then you say that the spreadsheet example was done "in script." You're agreeing with me that HTML alone is not sufficient for forms-based UIs. Again.
The bottom line is that Flash is not an effective tool for creating websites. This is what HTML was designed for. With Flash, there are two things that particularly get my goat:
- you can't right-click a link and open it in the background (as I do often with Opera), in order to check out several areas of the site at once. This may sound like something that broadband users would complain about the most, because they can load several pages in parallel quickly, but actually it's something that I find not only helpful for efficiency, but necessary for my sanity as a dialup user, because if I had to click every page in serial I would spend so long waiting for the single page I can view to load that I'd stop using the internet altogether
- the second thing is that Flash sites are typically rendered at 640x480 or 800x600 to cater for users with low-end monitors, and cannot be resized unless the designer has actually thought of this (seems like such an obvious thing is either way too simple for Flash designers to think of, or they're just damned lazy). This means that this stupid little website is sitting in the middle of my 1152x864 screen, with an enormous blank space around it. Some people even do this with html for some completely unknown reason; for a good example of a site that uses both Pointless Flash(TM) for a Pointless Entrypage(TM) and Huge Blank Spaces(TM) check out the personal website of someone I don't like very much. I'm sure those people with 21" monitors and 2080x1024 screen resolutions know far better than I what I'm talking about
To be fair, there are sites that use Flash as a banner animation at the top, and it doesn't get in the way and is merely decorative, and that's fine, it's attractive and enhances the site. A good example of this is NZ Gamer Forums, and an example of a site that is annoying in its use of a complete Flash "gui" is its parent site. Yes, it's well-laid out and attractive, but just for starters, try entering your name into the "username" section. If you touch-type like I do, you'll very quickly get over how the animations when you enter a character are neet, and pretty quickly discover how they're very irritating. The sounds, too, are annoying to me. Basically, I think this website could have been made to look similar simply using HTML, and it would have loaded far more quickly (it took a good three minutes to load on my 56k--more than I'm normally willing to wait).The Forums are an example of Flash used in moderation, and JavaScript used in debatable moderation. I have no problem with it; it does add to the site having those tables light up blue, but it's also not particularly necessary. Mostly the site is very usable, and while there are a lot of images, it doesn't take a hugely long time to load. I think the person who designed the gamer.net.nz site and subsites needs a lesson in accessibility, because his sites are great if you can run Flash and feel like waiting for all the images to load, but get a browser like Opera 6, assume you don't have the flash plugin, and disable images so it loads faster, and you'll get a broken frontpage, and semi-broken threads in the forums because you have to use the horizontal scroll so much--the only thing this guy knows how to do is eye-candy.
The only real gripe I have against JavaScript is the open() function. A lot of people seem to think it's a really great idea to have links open in a new window using this function. I'm all for opening in a new window; I do it on my site all the time--and you'll notice I use basic JavaScript for the image rollovers in the title, because they markedly add to the visual effect of the site without increasing much in the download time. But hey, there's already this great attribute called "target" in the <a> tag! Use it! I loathe sites where I right-click, open a window in the background without checking its exact href in the status bar of my browser, and going back to it a few seconds later expecting it to have loaded and finding a blank page with "javascript:open(window.crap)" in the address bar.
Okay, that last thing about JS was really offtopic. My point is that it doesn't matter how much you rework Flash; it's still going to be slower and less functional than html, and it's still not going to run on as many computers. You're also going to find that most of the people who adopt it are the idiots already designing crap Flash websites. I don't see a winning situation here.
Just my little rant. Please mod down accordingly.
Well-known usability expert Jakob Nielsen has been found dead in his home. The suicide note simply said, "God, make it stop!"
And before you say "It already comes with the browser..." maybe you should recall that Microsoft didn't ship Java with XP.
Seastead this.
I would moderate this whole thread down. I orginally took a look at Flash back in '98 when it was at Version 3. I thought Flash was interesting and saw you could do some pretty cool stuff with it. What I have always thought though was Macromedia missed the point. Flash should have never been marketed for the Web stuff as much as a PRESENTATION tool.
The best use of Flash I ever saw was looking through the FAQ for my printer (Epson 1280) and seeing an animation of someone setting the printer to banner mode. That's what Flash is good at, any and all other uses quite frankly suck. I will say the Flash ads are a little nicer in that if I am "TRULY" interested in something it will give me more info. However, Flash sucks for navigation, for intros, for whole sites and everything in between.
In other words...I'm not a fan.
Anybody out there, who could tell me from where can I download one player for my solaris/mozilla? And for the linux/mozilla of my fater's machine? I went to macromedia.com, and not even a sign of planning these.
So? Am I forced to chose MS or Mac? The Brave New World! From now on, should I give up, and push a "Cancel" button whenever the browser cries out for "appropriate" plugin? For every single page containing an ad in flash?
I am very nervous. Who can garantee that Macromedia will provide a unix player?
And if the Web goes more and more swf. Will they stop providing a unix player once?
We ARE depending on them, RIGHT NOW, what is to come?
Going further: There are at least two bugs in the version 5 player. The Mozilla developers did not get any answer from macromedia about them, so the plugin crashes when played with forwarded X. And crashes on linux, when using other sound players simultaneously. And this is for player 5.r47.
And now, there's version 6!
I wanna download. I want it now! Give me the URL of the Solaris version, please...
Oh, isn't there? No problem. I throw away my Sun computer, and Dude, I buy a Dell! With Preinstalled XP!> With Flash, we could easily browse Slashdot offline, we could have our client synchronize at
> regular intervals, or simply whenever the hell we wanted.
Errrr, ummmm, have you ever heard of nntp ? You know, the thing that use to be called "the internet" before the days of the web. I follow some of the Mozilla development newsgroups on a public news server. You can use various clients on just about any OS. With Flash, you need to run a stinkin GUI to view text... duhhhhh !!!
> For Slashdot, Flash could provide an encrypted and an embedded ad-delivery system. It probably wouldn't be tamper-proof, but at least it would
> ensure 99% of us could not read the content without disabling the ads.
Die, Suckwave-Flush, Die ! Fortunately, it's a plug-in that I cna manually remove from its directory in Mozilla.
> "Programmability?" Yes. Since version 5.0 it is. It's a fully-functioning object-oriented
> language and just like its brother, Javascript, Flash Actionscript can kick some serious ass.
Oh boy, just what we need. Yet another programmable language like Active-hacks and Javascript that can download code from infected websites and infect your computer. Remember, that was one of the vectors that NIMDA used for its propagation.
> You sound just like my pointy-hair headed boss. When Java first came out, he hated it because he
> thought Java was only for applets!
I understand the power of the whole concept. That's exactly what scares me. I hit the big 5 oh last October, and I remember the days when BBS was king. The one item that had to be constantly pounded into people's heads was not to download and execute every file you find. We were winning that battle before the web came along. Now we have websites *DEMANDING* that you download and execute code from their pages. Some of them don't even ask you to click yes before installing their code. Do a Google usenet search on all the people who've been victimized by visiting http://www.gohip.com and ended up with the website in their sigfile. And let's not forget "comet cursors". I await the "wonders" of "a fully-functioning object-oriented language" in the hands of marketeers and skript-kiddies. It'll make the gazillion-windows-on-close ("mousetrapping") stunt look tame by comparison. I refuse to surrender control of my computer.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Care to at least post an URL? Stairs are way more wheelchair-friendly then ramps. Yeah right!
Millions of web-developer hours have been wasted trying to get HTML do things it was never designed to do. People are quick to blame the various implementations for not follow the standard properly, but to me, the incredible difficulty all the implementors seem to be having is a symptom of flaws in HTML itself. I'm not saying there's anything better right now (and certainly not Flash), but HTML is still crap and I'll be glad when it dies.
You obviously know fuck all about SGML/HTML/XML (and as someone pointed out, CSS).
Bottom line, Flash is a propriety piece of shit built for "wow" effect. XML like protocols are open standards that have a _purpose_, are flexible and versatile (and I don't mean versatile in that you can make 50 billion different tweens and other shit in Flash). Flash type _interactivity_ should be heralded for the value it creates in corporate/customer service sites (even though some, myself included, prefer simple, logically set out, mainly text pages). Some people really do like it, and as long as that's true, I don't think you can argue against it, just because you're some sophisticated 'hacker' (I'm agreeing with you here). But do we want everything done Macromedia's way?
http://www.relevare.com
I count ECMAScript as part of HTML. Well, it isn't, you're right. But it's a standard part of web browsers that integrates well with HTML.
I've thought about it a bit, and I think you have better points than I give you credit for.
Looking over some of the forms we've done, I agree that something needs to be done. Implementing things in HTML+script is just not that nice - I guess doing it for so long I've forgotten just how bad it is.
I think the web needs a new standard. Hopefully it's text based, open, well integrated with code, and a lot more consistent than HTML. Unfortunately, I don't see anything like that around the corner.
In short, currently I manage with HTML/script, and don't think Flash is the answer for my headaches. But maybe it's better than I think it is.
Anywho, have a good day... been an interesting discussion anyway.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
That's precisely why I use Mac OS X. It can perfectly mirror my production environment - Apache with mod_perl - and run Photoshop and Flash, on one machine, at the same time.
I understand that, but what if your server platform has quirks that Mac OS X doesn't, or vice-versa?
Will I retire or break 10K?
By disabling Flash, you make more good than bad, unless you love large blinking, running and screaming banners!
Instructions on how to remove Flash plug-in. For testing purposes, yeah :-)
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
The only people that actually like Flash are the Mac-using, VW-driving, long haired hippie art school reject faggots that want to do it for a living rather than learn a valuable skill. Get a haircut and learn some real programming, you Yanni-listening, turd-licking rejects. Jeez..
Thinking they're a valuable member of the team. Isn't that adorable?
Me: Did I talk to you? Be silent while I'm working...I have to get this SQL work done.
Flash Fag: Do you need me to make the company logo spin around or something?
Me: No! Go get me coffee!
there is a place for flash on the web. this has more to do with SVG being a script and the nature of the commercial market. It also has to do with Macromedia selling boxes on the shelves :)
Say you create a shmick commercial SVG site for a paying customer. Opps firstly there's no real browser support for SVG at the moment (forget the plug-in argument) and remember that it's more than likely that the bulk of users are going to stick to their old browsers - (useit.com Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003) sans an SVG plug-in. So immediatly there's demmand for a SVG-like tool to do animation - this is where Flash fits in.
The reason why commercial op's are going to keep using flash is they want their code wrapped up in a binary format. The first time a competitor/interested party comes up to new site there is the possibility to yoink the plain text script. (havent looked at the spec since 1.0 - is there a binary format possible?)
So there's going to be plenty of room in the market for an open standards (SVG) and closed binary standards (Flash). Different formats for different uses.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
just because the bible was the only publication
gutenberg could find a client for (at first)
doesn't mean that's all his press was capable of.
jon-at-shovemedia-dot-com
[Flash] vs [HTML, SVG, VRML, Java, and CGI]
All the things on the right can be used together to make something much more powerful than the sum of its parts. + It can all be developed from a text editor.
The thing on the left has a 'hide source' flag that software can choose to ignore if it wants (making it as pointless as region encoding). Why would anyone use technology from a developer who thought this was a good philosophy?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
How many people master both crafts - programming and good graphical design arts?
Not so many. One of the few I got aware of is John Maeda who first studied computer science, then did arts school, today an influential MIT professor. Cool artist that uses the cheap repetetive features of a computer to create beautiful art.
He did some cool Java applets as well, I particulary like the MIT navigation prototype.
If no one manages to educate and interest more propelerheads in arts, we will stay with the flash people for the mainstream presentations.
Did I mention that scientific apps are among the worst GUIs I ever saw? :-)
Be careful for what you wish. It might come true.
AnFX. Doesn't look like it is as powerful as I'd like, I don't see any hooks to do anything really powerful.
Bleh!