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Adobe Makes Flash Crawlable
nickull wrote in his journal that "Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of Flash content. Until now, developers had to implement workarounds for exposing text content used in Flash to search-engine spiders and other bots such as using XHTML data providers. While the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet clear how it will be utilized by the search engines, as they have not revealed their algorithms. The SWF specification is openly published."
Amazing what a little competition will bring...
I'd be much happier if the search engines quit linking to flash-only websites completely. Then maybe those horrible things would go away.
I can't think of any case where I've seen a Flash-only site where Flash added anything of substance (cuteness doesn't count), and they tend to be hard and non-standard to navigate, break key bindings (like CTRL-T to open a new tab doesn't work if mouse is over Flash), etc.
Here is an example: A business association's website was redesigned in Flash. Instead of their staff page having a simple list of photos, names, job titles and phone numbers that you could search by hitting CTRL-F, the flash version just shows a photo of all of the staff members and you can only find the job titles and contact info by holding the mouse over the appropriate person's photo. So, if you want to find the contact info for the newsletter producer and you don't already know what he/she looks like, you have to move your mouse over each of 15 different photos until you find the right one. Stupid. There is just too much dumb stuff going on with Flash.
For a start, "crawlable" does not mean it WILL be crawled. More likely, most flash will contain nothing but junk and internals that were never meant to be seen anyway. I wonder when the first "we recovered a password that was stored inside a flash file" / "we googled for vulnerable flash apps and found these" hits will come about. And, as someone's already pointed out, if you *can* extract the text from them, you can't do much useful with it besides say "it's in this Flash somewhere". You can't even do "find in page" once you've clicked on such a link. And if it's at the end of an hour-long Flash animation, you're not going to sit through it.
Then you'll have some people who have actually used bitmaps instead of text inside the Flash for various reasons, etc. The only useful thing to come out of this may well be a "View as HTML" version of Flash-only pages. But they will still be second-class pages because the designer didn't want to do it theirselves.
Given that people who use Flash aren't exactly the most popular people in the world (e.g. if you want it to appear in Google, be read by people, to be bookmarked, to be quoted/cited/linked etc.), this won't affect much - Finding content in a Flash file is like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's the problem solved by this announcement. However, finding *useful* content in that file is going to be even worse, and actually getting users TO that data will be almost impossible.
I imagine that the same thing will happen as it did with images, PDF's, etc. Those who design their Flash well will get something indexed and it'll actually get a hit or two from "View HTML Version" on Google. Those who don't (i.e. 99% of the people who make them) won't see any difference at all.
It always surprised me there is no Linux distro that has gone trough the trouble of wrapping systrace around the Flash plugin (or the entire browser?)
I would definitely like to have a Flash-enabled browser that runs in a sandbox, and has only access to some of its own files (to store cookies/settings/etc.) but does not have access to the rest of my homedir.
If these things could get cleared up, I wouldn't mind seeing a Flash Web... where Flash isn't a box in the center of an HTML page, but the basic protocol itself (like what Curl claims to be).
Of course given the cludginess of most Flash apps, maybe I'm just being a masochist here!
My company and a couple others that friends of mine work for are all currently re-writing their web front ends to use flex exclusively. Granted in all of these cases, these software packages are intended for internal corporations - there are a growing number of developers using Flex for general web sites because it eliminates cross browser compatibility issues. If you don't know anything about Flex, you should head over to Adobe's web site and read up on it.
Yes, that's true. Emphasis added to the comment I was replying to:
nine-times was specifically talking about options available to developers.
That's usually true, but like you say, there are exceptions, and it's not just the ones you mention. Frames, for example, cause similar problems, and JavaScript too (not just Ajax).
I'm not sure if you are aware of this (a lot of people here don't seem to be), but search engines already index Flash. Google example. Yes, Flash results are identified in the same way PDF results are.
This isn't a new feature, it's Adobe helping search engines improve the indexing they already do.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I dunno, I think that's a minor point. The rest of his points were valid about the how much flash sucks.
But if it makes you feel better, I'll add a few more.
No 64bit version of the plugin.
When your cursor is over a flash object in a page, you lose the ability scroll with your mouse.
Flash based site navigation removes the ability to use your browser controls (back, forward, refresh) as they were intended.
Flash is moderately useful as video player for things like youtube, for just about any other use it's 100% garbage and should be avoided at all costs.
This would be great if it can be implemented directly into web browsers. For example, a Firefox plugin that allows me to specify "view text only" for Flash content.
Or is this "proprietary" information that will only be given to Google and Yahoo and not shared with the us commoners?
I don't know what brain damage causes people to think that they should present text a half a dozen words at a time in a slideshow, but it would be great if my browser would default to showing me all the text from a flash slideshow and then let me choose if I really want to see it pieced out a few words at a time.
Uhh... there are now several ways for flash developers to allow deep linking in to flash... it uses a hash and directory structure with javascript to pass the url into flash, which then auto loads or skips to the content being requested.
This is not new, it's been around for 2 years now.
Here's a site I built in just such a fashion:
http://www.soursweetgone.com/flash/#/friends/punk-a-friend/
This section of the site lets you upload a photo, morph it using a displacement map filter to either spherize or pinch the photo.. don't forget to zoom in on the good part... then you can email the results with a message to anyone. (yes we collect your info, but it's a candy company... your choice).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Actually, at home I do have broadband. But I like taking cheap shots at Adobe. So far they've saved me hundreds of dollars by forcing me into the Gimp because Photoshop isn't ported to Linux yet.
You hear me, Adobe! Do not port Photoshop to Linux! I need to keep my money in the bank!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It most definitely IS as bad as was said, and worse.
See this thing called the Internet was built upon an OPEN standard. Flash is CLOSED. To participate in the Internet, were it made of Flash, you would need to use both the CLOSED Flash viewer to view any of it (which favors CLOSED platforms as opposed to OPEN platforms), and to produce content you would have to pay for the CLOSED development suite.
In the second place, I don't care how many features Adobe adds. 1000 words of plain text is 2KB. 1000 words encoded into a Flash file is 50KB. That's extra minutes to store and transmit it every time it is edited or viewed, extra time wasted on both ends to create it and read it, and all around amounts to a useless, worthless, FAIL.
But I suppose corporations rue the day they let us have the WWW, freely accessible and neutral and free.
There's a subtle problem here: the standard is open in the sense that it's published, but it's still under the control of one company. If they liked, they could pull a Microsoft, and change the "standard" so that the next version would break everyone else's code.
We might say that it is "open" but not "free", eh?
(There's also a less-subtle problem, that Flash is designed to turn your computer into a television set. But some people will never get enough television.)