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?"

Comments

Flash & Accessibility?

[Trinity-Infinity]

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....

Re:Flash & Accessibility?

[mblase]

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.

They're not. Simple as that.

If you're developing using Flash, then you're assuming your client has a graphical operating system and a graphical browser. Granted, it's a minority of the web-surfing world that relies on Braille displays or text-to-speech readers or keyboard-only access, but they do exist.

However, it's not really fair to shoot the messenger. Developers have been demanding this sort of thing from Flash, because clients have been demanding it from developers. Macromedia is simply giving people what they've asked for.

It's the clients that are the problem, clients and underexperienced developers. Too many people don't realize that "universal accessibility" is something that should be built into every Web site, or at least taken into account. The example site cited in the News.com article understands this perfectly -- they include a link to a low-bandwidth version which provides the same functionality using ordinary Web-based forms, and of course the home page lists the phone number for information and reservations. Those who have Flash are treated to a dynamically-updated reservation system stored entirely on one Web page; the rest have ready access to non-Flash or phone-based methods. Good developers; much praise and approval from self.

Of course, there will be developers who create their sites using Flash and nothing but, and they'll eventually get complaints and either address them or ignore them. But there have always been developers who ignore accessibility; I'm still the only guy at my company who uses ALT tags universally. But it's not fair to say "Macromedia shouldn't be offering this tool" when it's the developers and clients, not Macromedia, who need to consider accessibility.

Re:Flash & Accessibility?

[ConceptJunkie]

I think MM is responding to customer (i.e., web developers') demand. When Flash was first around, it was used just as you described. However, as MM added more and more capapbilities to it, people found it could take on more and more of their Web site. Is MM at fault for adding features to their product?

I think it's reasonable for MM to let Flash do what people are willing to pay for it to do, and that's what's happening. If enough people with accessibility problems (handicapped users, hand-held users, the incredibly powerful Lynx users coalition) complain enough, MM will be sure to respond even if the people using the tools don't.

Flash was a complete hassle when it first came out (I refused to even install it for a long time), but now it has become completely transparent (at least to a MSIE-zombie like me), and it hardly even bugs me anymore. Of course, like everything else in the hideous chimera that is WWW technology, it has caused people to erode any UI standards that still remained (even MS is throwing their own standards out the Window, look at the installer for Visual Studio .NET, I could write a book on the horrible UI in that program alone).

The Internet (the WWW, specifically) brought software development to the masses in a way that even VB or POwerBuilder could not, and we often gain as much pain as we do freedom, power and innovation because of it. If MM weren't around, someone else would take its place.

Flash is annoying more often than not

[Aexia]

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.

Why no flash dev tools for Linux?

[Picass0]

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.

Flash is nice but...

[PotatoHead]

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.

More closed web 'standards'

[HalfFlat]

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.

Flash developers are being smarter about how they're using Flash.

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.

There are open standards...

[danro]

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. =(

Re:Flash will always be Eye Candy.

[Chagrin]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[JMZero]

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.

.

Re:"Flash" is a good name for the product

[StormyMonday]

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?

Affordable?

[hether]

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.

question

[BigBir3d]

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.

Macromedia doesn't have the right stuff...

[Da VinMan]

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).