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Macromedia Pushes Flash For All Things Web
nakhla writes: "This article at News.com details how Macromedia is expanding its Flash product to be more of an all-in-one web solution. Rather than relying on HTML codes to design web pages and embedding Flash as one component, Macromedia wants Flash to be used to design the entirety of a site. Pre-built components, such as scrollbars and buttons, are included to allow designers to write everything using the new Flash product. With websites becoming more and more complex, and the trend to move towards providing web services rather than application software, could something like this be the answer? The article also mentions how Macromedia is on a campaign to have its Flash plugin included in all Internet-compatible devices. How long before we see a Qt based plugin for the Qtopia handheld project?"
How would sites written in Flash be accessible to disabled users of the internet, that rely on alt-tags and other items to navigate a site successfully. I had a hard enough time trying to navigate DoCoMo's website (in flash) through the Babelfish translator. I can only imagine how hard it would be were the site in English and the user blind or unable to use their hands/fingers/etc....
That's like saying HTML never added anything to a site. 100% true. It's the content that matters, no whow it's delivered. But let's face it... if you have good content, then it look s a hell of a lot better in Flash than it does in a single page of text.
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
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...
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.
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®.
if you have good content, then it look s a hell of a lot better in Flash than it does in a single page of text.
I'm intrigued by this comment. How would Flash improve, say, Slashdot? Slashdot is essentially pages of text, with small, simple graphics.
What would you add? Besides 250KB - 500KB per page of overhead, that is. Animations? Distracts from the text. Better linking? How? Typefaces? I like my defaults, thankyouverymuch. Splash pages? Yeah, I really need a movie at each new page. Programmability? Not in Flash, you don't.
Perhaps you could take something simple like, say, an RFC and do a Flash version to show us how it's better?
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
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?