Those numbers seem very high to me, I'd also consider where you're reading them (the Macromedia site...) for the obvious bias
Man people like you crack me up...you could tell them the sky's blue and they'll argue that it's a colorful shade of gray. Like someone already posted to you, you really should do your homework before you start spouting things off. Flash traditionally has an 80% adoption rate in 12 months. That's higher than any browser and OS adoption. You want to say that people won't upgrade and people hate downloading a plug-in??? You show me the numbers where people have turned Flash off. You have that stat handy? Show me the numbers where people have uninstalled the plugin...any numbers for that?? Sorry but I can go off of the high tech "I've seen" stat your so quick to refernce.
take this quote from John Dowdell (and yes he is a Macromedia employee...stating FACTS)..
"According to AssetMatrix, Windows 2000 is the most-often used Windows version in medium- and large-sized corporations, edging out XP 48 percent to 37 percent. Put another way, roughly half of all Windows installs in corporations are Windows 2000." Operating systems require a big commitment to upgrade... as the OS was released four years ago, that's about 10% adoption per year, compared to 80% for a small browser plugin which doesn't change your daily environment.
- firstly, and this is very important, if a page is made entirely in flash then a search engine can't glean text from it when it comes to crawl it if all your content is compiled into a swf. true, flash will publish your text as html comments, but this is a fairly lame work-around as keywords in comments don't rank particularly highly in google's algorithms. at least with a site that uses ajax, its first state will be accessable to text crawlers.
Actually AJAX apps suffer from this same issue when most of the content is fed in dynamically to avoid page refresh issues. And I know the arguement is going to be that there is HTML content on the page initially and that part can be searched and indexed by search engine. This is actually possible with Flash as well by using Geoff Stearns Flash Object. This method will act as a detection script as well as provide static HTML content on the page for search engine.
- secondly, jpg images look crusty in flash. even with jpg quality settings set high you still get a worse looking bitmap image than if you placed the image in html. so, flash, good for vectors, crap for bitmaps.
In most cases this is an authoring issue and not a technology issue. There where a few bugs in some early players that caused a pixel shit, which was easy enough to work around. Flash can actually display the same image without noticable loss in quality yet at a much reduced size than a standard browser... I think thats a benefit to flash.
- the quality of text rendered in a swf is fairly terrible when it's small (i.e., your normal 10-12pt 'screen' height). unless you set the text properties to be 'dynamic', which limits how you can use it.
Somewhat true, yet again this can be looked at as an authoring issue. Theres has been some well documented ways to offer very crisp clean text in Flash that's easy enough to read just by making sure the text is on a pure pixel and not a half pixel. As a benefit however Flash offers support for any font you want, and therefore opens the doors wide open for fonts that may be easier to read, look better, etc... that standard HTML cannot offer.
- text is unselectable (again, unless it has been set to 'dynamic' which it rarely is) so if people want to copy and paste something from your site then tough luck to them.
As was mentioned this is an authoring issue, not a technology issue
i use flash all the time, but not to build whole sites with. it's perfect for small embedded sections. but what ajax ultimately has over flash is that it uses native internet technolgies, and so many things from spiders to users rely on the web being the web.
If people where just using AJAX to display data and refresh sections of the page for content I would agree that they are using native (but not standard) current (with no absolute garuntee of future support) internet technologies. However when developers start heading down the road of 'Flash like emulation' using javascript for animation, effects, etc... that arguement begins to loose water. Mnay techniques people are using to emulate Flash are makeing use of browser dependant support and requires the code to degrade for users of other browsers. This to my is bad as you punish users for not choosing your browser of choice (which is the same naive arguement people use against Flash by the way). People want to talk about not relying on a company for support... they do that already...they rely on Microsoft to display over 80% of their content. And Microsoft has a track record of making things 'different just to be different'....
Actually this can be accomplished very easy in flash by using a blank shell as the main movie that the html code references and set the size values to 100%, you then scale the shell movie to fit the content or loaded movies. This will in fact trigger a change in the browser scrollbar as needed... take a look at http://www.vehix.com...they/ do this very well.
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Those numbers seem very high to me, I'd also consider where you're reading them (the Macromedia site...) for the obvious bias
Man people like you crack me up...you could tell them the sky's blue and they'll argue that it's a colorful shade of gray. Like someone already posted to you, you really should do your homework before you start spouting things off. Flash traditionally has an 80% adoption rate in 12 months. That's higher than any browser and OS adoption. You want to say that people won't upgrade and people hate downloading a plug-in??? You show me the numbers where people have turned Flash off. You have that stat handy? Show me the numbers where people have uninstalled the plugin...any numbers for that?? Sorry but I can go off of the high tech "I've seen" stat your so quick to refernce.
take this quote from John Dowdell (and yes he is a Macromedia employee...stating FACTS)..
"According to AssetMatrix, Windows 2000 is the most-often used Windows version in medium- and large-sized corporations, edging out XP 48 percent to 37 percent. Put another way, roughly half of all Windows installs in corporations are Windows 2000." Operating systems require a big commitment to upgrade... as the OS was released four years ago, that's about 10% adoption per year, compared to 80% for a small browser plugin which doesn't change your daily environment.
Got any numbers showing that's false???
- firstly, and this is very important, if a page is made entirely in flash then a search engine can't glean text from it when it comes to crawl it if all your content is compiled into a swf. true, flash will publish your text as html comments, but this is a fairly lame work-around as keywords in comments don't rank particularly highly in google's algorithms. at least with a site that uses ajax, its first state will be accessable to text crawlers. Actually AJAX apps suffer from this same issue when most of the content is fed in dynamically to avoid page refresh issues. And I know the arguement is going to be that there is HTML content on the page initially and that part can be searched and indexed by search engine. This is actually possible with Flash as well by using Geoff Stearns Flash Object. This method will act as a detection script as well as provide static HTML content on the page for search engine. - secondly, jpg images look crusty in flash. even with jpg quality settings set high you still get a worse looking bitmap image than if you placed the image in html. so, flash, good for vectors, crap for bitmaps. In most cases this is an authoring issue and not a technology issue. There where a few bugs in some early players that caused a pixel shit, which was easy enough to work around. Flash can actually display the same image without noticable loss in quality yet at a much reduced size than a standard browser... I think thats a benefit to flash. - the quality of text rendered in a swf is fairly terrible when it's small (i.e., your normal 10-12pt 'screen' height). unless you set the text properties to be 'dynamic', which limits how you can use it. Somewhat true, yet again this can be looked at as an authoring issue. Theres has been some well documented ways to offer very crisp clean text in Flash that's easy enough to read just by making sure the text is on a pure pixel and not a half pixel. As a benefit however Flash offers support for any font you want, and therefore opens the doors wide open for fonts that may be easier to read, look better, etc... that standard HTML cannot offer. - text is unselectable (again, unless it has been set to 'dynamic' which it rarely is) so if people want to copy and paste something from your site then tough luck to them. As was mentioned this is an authoring issue, not a technology issue i use flash all the time, but not to build whole sites with. it's perfect for small embedded sections. but what ajax ultimately has over flash is that it uses native internet technolgies, and so many things from spiders to users rely on the web being the web. If people where just using AJAX to display data and refresh sections of the page for content I would agree that they are using native (but not standard) current (with no absolute garuntee of future support) internet technologies. However when developers start heading down the road of 'Flash like emulation' using javascript for animation, effects, etc... that arguement begins to loose water. Mnay techniques people are using to emulate Flash are makeing use of browser dependant support and requires the code to degrade for users of other browsers. This to my is bad as you punish users for not choosing your browser of choice (which is the same naive arguement people use against Flash by the way). People want to talk about not relying on a company for support... they do that already...they rely on Microsoft to display over 80% of their content. And Microsoft has a track record of making things 'different just to be different'....
Actually this can be accomplished very easy in flash by using a blank shell as the main movie that the html code references and set the size values to 100%, you then scale the shell movie to fit the content or loaded movies. This will in fact trigger a change in the browser scrollbar as needed... take a look at http://www.vehix.com...they/ do this very well.