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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?"
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....
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.
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!
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.
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...
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
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.
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."
Take it from the expert, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 29, 2000 - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html
Unless a Links plugin is one of them, I say bugger off with your flashy bullshit.
Why should I have to re-generate a binary file every time someone changes some content?
... you think it's very fast on your developing machine, but just you wait until it's been deployed and is perhaps being re-generated every 5 seconds.
It takes unnecessary amount of CPU power.
Oh, sure
Flash definitely has bad implementations as well as good implementations; I'm by no means advocating 100% use, but sometimes the flexibility of Flash allows a better UI.
Anyway, to counter some of your statements:
1) Flash can be dynamic. Check out JGenerator, an open source, Apache-style licensed dynamic generator for flash at http://www.flashgap.com/
2) Any intelligent developer will know to keep their content seperate from their presentation, and should be able to create alternate interfaces, such as plain HTML.
3) The "back" button really isn't the greatest paradigm (motif) to begin with. The only purpose for its use is for sites with poor navigation, where users can tend to get lost in a maze of subpages with no clear way to get back to where they were.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
I really don't care if Flash has some new feature that approximates the functionality of HTML.
My point is that it's seldom used, and is against the way the web works.
If you're going to do waypoints in a movie, it shouldn't be via some extension in the plugin. As I explained in my post, Flash authors should always have been doing their navigation by calling a new HTML page (with parameters to start the same Flash data at the navigated-to page).
This means that the plugin wouldn't have to worry about back/forward/anchoring, because that would be the browser's job. And the browser would be able to implement it however the user liked, instead of however the darn plugin liked. But I guess that's the way Flash likes it: We control everything.
With HTML (and your choice of browser), you control everything. If you want to get a browser that automatically pastes your address in form fields marked "EMail", then you get a browser that does that. If you want a browser that displays text and form fields, but not images, you get that. Whatever you want, you get. With Flash, you get what the site wants you to get, when it wants to give it to you.
Also, a correctly done Flash/HTML page could be simply defined to have an alternative, Flash free version for any given query string, thus giving the developer one tree to work on.
HTML is simple, but brilliant. And Flash has it's uses. But the idea of replacing HTML navigation with Flash is mind numbingly stupid.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Absolutely a good point. Flash sites don't index properly.
I have customers who complain to me about their sites not showing up on search engines, and get the fun of explaining that their choice of web designers screwed them.
I think the other points about accessibility issues are also right on. Microsoft accessibility solutions are not a step forward, but a step backward. Sites that are truly accessible should be usuable and navigable via lynx+a text reader.
aem
-a.e.mossberg
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.
Its just as easy to maintain a flash site as it is an html site. Ive seen cases where the flash is easier to maintain. In flash, like DHTML, you have the ability to layer things. The problem with most HTML sites is everytime I go to a new page, the entire site reloads, that is absurd. In flash you can load your navigation in once, it will be persistant. You dont have to 'include' your nav in everypage your build, thats stupid too. Flash also provides for a better seperation between design and content. Flash requests data or content in url encoded or XML form and can then format that content in anyway. The jsp, asp programmer doesnt need to know how that content will be presented.(ie. color, font size etc...). This makes for a more efficient process. Instead of HTML programmers and middleware programmers working off of the same files stepping on each others toes.
Maybe in some abstract design process this is true. In reality, when I hit "back" I very quickly get the page I had just been looking at; when I hit a link to the same page (what you're advocating) I have to wait for the relevant packets to zip back & forth over the internet.
if you have good content, then it look s a hell of a lot better in Flash than it does in a single page of text.
I'm intrigued by this comment. How would Flash improve, say, Slashdot? Slashdot is essentially pages of text, with small, simple graphics.
What would you add? Besides 250KB - 500KB per page of overhead, that is. Animations? Distracts from the text. Better linking? How? Typefaces? I like my defaults, thankyouverymuch. Splash pages? Yeah, I really need a movie at each new page. Programmability? Not in Flash, you don't.
Perhaps you could take something simple like, say, an RFC and do a Flash version to show us how it's better?
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
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.
check out
http://cavex.avexnet.or.jp/index.jsp
for an example. This site is 100% flash music portal site in japan, and the front end is totally dynamic and can be changed on the fly or personalized for indidual users. Many of the standard techniques for modifying content can be applied, although there are some changes you may have to make regarding dataformat, etc.
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
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!