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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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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 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!
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].
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Dude, 1996 called. Microsoft wants their business strategy back.
monolinux.com
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.
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...
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)
I thought we already *had* one Flash virus, didn't we?
In any case:
ProxyBlock macromedia.com
to the rescue.
The Web is no place for proprietary shit.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
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.
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
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.
... 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.
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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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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®.
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
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.
...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"?
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.
actually thats kinda what C# and .NET want to do, and java was supposed to do (and to some extent did) is provide client-server model data flow with applications that sit on the client's machine, and communicate over HTTP or HTTPS (XML-RPC and SOAP), bypassing webpages/websites altogether. Still, i like the web and browsers because you (generally) have little overhead for what you get out of content delivery.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
.. 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.
Maybe, but can you create or modify Flash with $EDITOR? Yeah...didn't think so.
Sometime before I came along, my company's website was done entirely in Flash. One of these days I'll get around to trashing it and replacing it with proper HTML. (Have a look at all the meta tags...Google won't, so you might as well. :-) )
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
how about market penetration? (both of developers using it, and people with installed clients)
"Old man yells at systemd"
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>
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..."
I don't think it's a problem of the standards, but rather of non-conforming browsers. This has resulted in that developers are swaying away from using DHTML in their sites.
As a side effect, Flash has picked up in popularity...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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.
But we should stop and consider what the average Internet user is looking for from the web.
Why? Surely if we know what we're doing, and consider this to be a bad move, its our duty (again) to be the poor shmuck that has to stand up and tell people that the emporer has no clothes.
An all Flash web would fundamentally change the nature of the net, lots of things we take for granted now would change radically: search engine access, cross-platform accesibility, proprietary vs. open protocols. My personal is that its a fairly horrifying concept.
I think Macromedia's initiative has a good chance at success.
Depressingly, I tend to agree.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
I absolutely agree. SVG is cool. It would be ten times more useful than Flash, if only a manufacturer would create a good authoring environment for it and all browsers had SVG functionality.
That's a day I'm looking forward to!
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.
WTF?
Sometime in 1996, I remember asking my bank a few years ago about how to bank online. They gave me a Windoze CD and said "run this, it's our online banking proggie."
The conversation immediately turned to "Your competitor has a web site that I can access from any platform, and no proprietary software. I barely trust my web browser, I sure as fsck don't trust your 'doze binary. Since you won't understand what that means, let me phrase my question in language you do understand: How can I close my account with you and transfer it to them?"
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.
...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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Maybe they were having a hard time dishing out all that bloated Flash.
Ah, a sign of the web to come.
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.
Links is a pretty darn good text based browser, it's amazing at rendering tables, etc.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
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."
You are lucky you can't see it ;-)
no sig.
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?
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!
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.
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...
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!
I'll dig more when I get home from work...
Bleh!
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?
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
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).
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.
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(I take it you mean this book.)
I just wanted to say thanks heaps for writing it. I've been following SVG for about the last year or so, but at the moment it's very difficult to get hold of documentation about it apart from the official W3C specifications. It's great to finally see some books coming out finally, and especially since I'm now working at a place where I'm trying to convince my boss to go down the SVG route.
It's good to see the Mozilla developers taking it up and the next thing I'm hoping for is that Microsoft will start supporting it natively in IE so there's no plugin required. It's a bit awkward though that there's currently only about seven references to SVG in the entire MSDN.
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.
I've just finished doing almost the same thing with PHP/Javascript/HTML. Why does Flash provide a more viable solution in this regard?
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.
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?
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Hi Ho! Hi Ho!
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.
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
"Surprisingly enough, there WAS a winner."
...barely. I bent the rules a bit. There was NOT a very clear winner. They did qualify for the prize, but just by a hair.
The intent of the challenge was to get people talking about Flash as a development platform for e-commerce web sites. At the time, Flash was really only being used on web development sites ("Hire us, just LOOK at how cool this is!"), on art/graphic design sites, and for advertisements. Yet, I was constantly getting email via my site (WebWord) that Flash was great and could basically do ANYTHING.
Flash has been abused again and again. I think with the new direction, some abuse might end. And, Macromedia has made an attempt to descrease the abuse with their focus on usability. But let's face it, right now, Flash is about...Flash. I'm waiting to see how much the tool will work as a development platform, particularly for e-commerce web sites.
How to Download YouTube Videos
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.
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."
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."
Interesting. Thanks for posting an example instead of just pontificating.
Unfortunately, all the examples that they gave come out in about 3 point type. Of course, since it's Flash and not HTML, there's no way to change the type size except by changing the screen resolution. Not worth it.
Hmm. I went back to look at it again and got nothing but a blue rectangle.
Something needs some work. Whether it's that Web page or Flash itself, I don't know. I rather suspect both.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Note that I said it wasn't the "greatest", not that it wasn't useful.
For chrissakes; he had three points and I was forced to make up whatever it was I could to refute his third point, regardless of the merit of my argument. Can you really blame me?
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
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."
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,
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.
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Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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.
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2002 /flash_mx_accessibility.html
They WILL have that support. As of yet the only verion that you can download off their site is 5.0. It remains to be seen just how good their accesibility features are.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
People keep saying this because nobody can see a site built with it!
I think that I'm fairly bleeding edge when it comes to technology, but I've not seen this. Guess I'm just behind the times.... Also, maybe I'm just brain dead but the link that you have there (phpbuilder.com) doesn't work. Well, the link works, but the example there doesn't. I can move the objects in the demo and stuff but the demo doesn't actually save anything. Maybe I'm just misinterpreting it, but whatever.
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Actually, OSX is based on the Mach kernel which is a fork off BSD. While it has BSD roots, they are quite old. The Mach kernel was the basis for NextStep, and that was 10 years ago.
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
Linux is not a UNIX brand system.
As a web developer, I must say this is simply not true. I don't care if the system I'm developing on shares any characteristics with the web server. I imagine the only sort of "web developer" that would care, would be the kind that uses Frontpage.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
...that's why you develop on a... DEVELOPMENT SERVER. Imagine that.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
no no no, what i'm saying, is that we have to treat web-designers like our little bitch-slaves. Sure, allot of them are good at what they do, but some are not and even though its their right to design crap sites, and if i don't like a site i shouldn't go there, but it doesn't change the fact that i get pissed off...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
[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? :-)
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!