Slashdot Mirror
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.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
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....
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
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.
One thing I did not like was that some of the ones I liked were entirely unlinkable. I could not even bookmark a page for my own referance. Great for designers wanting to keep absolute control over their content.
Bottom line, I never went back.
never mind that I wonder how a search engine will index a flash site. Heck, they usually do static pages only. Even java script calls to offsite get bypassed, nevet mind Flash.
So you have a great page that can only be ignored by search engines. Not that this is the way most sites get known, but it is a real issue.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Rather than relying on HTML codes to design web pages and embedding Flash as one component, Macromedia wants Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site [for all sites on the Internet]. Pre-built components, such as scrollbars and buttons, are included to allow designers to write everything using the new Flash product[to entice coders to use the Flash development environment].
:: All Linux, No Ads
Dude, 1996 called. Microsoft wants their business strategy back.
monolinux.com
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.
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...
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 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.
With a "built-in media player, based on Sorenson Media's video player" we're not going to see a source-available version any time soon. In the past Flash has been a security liability through buffer overruns in the player. There's no way they can be held accountable for them if there are no alternatives.
Executable material in web pages is very rarely necessary. When it is though there's that language, um, what was it called? Java? I hear some people code in that already.
Flash has been one of the suckiest aspects of the web in recent years. Given that it so counters accessibility, usability, cross-platformedness, and indexability, there is no way it can possibly be a good thing for web pages. It is the exact opposite of good for web pages.
There's no smart way of using Flash as part of the web. You can use HTTP as a transport mechanism for your closed Flash application, but you can use HTTP for anything. There's more to being part of the web than being served over port 80.Flash should be thrown out as a web application platform. Just tossed. Don't use it. The record shows that most flash is expensive, bandwidth sucking, usability crushing crud, which is all the more frustrating for its complete lack of necessity. The only Flash I've seen that was not so were animationts where the animations were themselves the content. In this situation Flash is a glorified video codec, and if that's all it was ever used for, things wouldn't be so bad.
It's hard to see how Flash could be fixed. One could open up the format, but that doesn't change the fact that it's sucky for the web. If a site uses Flash in a way that works well without it, why bother with it in the first place? If it doesn't degrade gracefully, then congratulations, you have made a site that throws away most of what makes the web actually useful.
You mean something like the combination SVG and ECMAScript (JavaScript).
Well, it already exists, and it's pretty nifty too...
Now if somebody just _used_ the stuff too.
With a good IDE (like Flash) for the designer dudes it would be great!
A pity it won't happen. Macromedia is calling the shots on 2D vector-graphics on the web, and they are happy with their proprietary format.
We wouldn't want any competition in the future, now would we?
It's a shame really, the flash IDE is a great product, if they just switched to a open, xml-based format (SVG-DTD) it would be even better.
But as I stated above, they won't. =(
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
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?
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®.
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!
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..."
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
My scroll wheel does not work.
:) )
:P
;) )
I cannot use my keyboard to scroll around through the text.
Oh sure those features (well at least keyboard functionality) COULD be added to individual flash animations, but why? Seriously now, each movie would have to independently implement these features, oh joy, like that is ever going to happen.
When such features are reliant upon the OS the system works the same across EVERYTHING that is viewed.
Not to mention that Flash is unwieldy when you only need to, say, oh, put up an image gallery. See my site. Simple. It works in Lynx. (I know, I tried it. The tables degrade very gracefully).
How well does Flash work for the handicapped? The blind, those who cannot see well, or anybody who just wants to have a site read to them from their computer while they are out in the kitchen fetching a snake. Yah sure those people ARE the minority, but as digital voice syntheses gets better and better more and more people will begin to use such virtual web page readers.
Of course OCR could be ran on all the text, but, uh. . . After a certain point, you just have to ask yourself. If your web site consists of text and pictures, why in the HELL Would you want to use a delivery method that is built first and foremost around graphic content delivery? That is like saving all of your text as GIFs, and that went out of style LOOONG ago. (Remember when n00bs used to do that? ^_^
Of course Flash can deliver text at a significantly lower size then a GIF file can, but it is still insane. Flash offers nothing to the majority of sites out there on the net. Think about it, how would Slashdot look as a Flash site? This is ignoring that Flash demands high levels of anti-aliasing to make anything look good. (though granted Flash does INDEED look good, more on this later.)
Then there is the matter of screen resolution.
You see the LOVELY thing about flash is that IN THEORY you can scale it to ANY resolution and, besides from any JPEG or other bitmap images embedded into it, the graphics will look just as good. (or bad. ^_^ )
Too bad WAAAY to many FRIGGIN IDIOTS decide to RESTRICT the size of their Flash animations. Oh lovely. Anybody on a 1600x1200 monitor who comes across a Flash animation in a browser window that is hard locked at 320x240 must have such a LOVELY time...
(this can be bypassed of course by viewing the page's source and going to the flash file directly, but it still is not all that nice...)
So one of flash's most lovely features is almost completely obliterated by user stupidity. Lovely.
(by comparison, few web sites place a lock on the size of their main site page, thankfully... )
In conclusion. Flash is overweight for general usage, has too high of a processor requirement for general usage, is platform dependent, requires IDEs to develop in (though I guess if you were REALLY patient. . . . . hmm, Flash was NOT made to be user editable on the text level though, HTML was) and has a nifty "run file on users computer" 'feature' that I really don't like. . . .
Flash _IS_ good for some things. Xiao Xiao rock . But taking 400mhz+ to render a page full of text? Noooo thanks. (ok 266mhz+ if the page is done properly. But you know how friggin EASY it is to screw up a movie and bloat the heck out of the size and kill all performance? Even for still scenes. . . . Flash is way to easy to make a costly mistake in. Bad HTML won't slow your system down to a crawl, though if your browser is feeling naughty it may crash.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Hi Ho! Hi Ho!
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