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.

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.

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:"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?

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.