Flash and the web
I recently stumbled across Phatterism, a homepage. It is a really cool flash app and I haven’t seen anything like it. The nav is really humanizing, I found it quite clever and well thought out. It makes you kind of want to click around to see what else happens.
But I think it demonstrates some of the weakness of using flash as your entire site as well. The obvious one is that it takes away any capacity to be spidered. That’s a decision that one makes when one replaces the standard browser with flash - the search engines may not, gasp, be a big concern for you. As a corrolary it also prevents anyone from deep linking into any of your pages, for example I might want to direct your attention to the video that he does about himself - but I’d have to give you the nav steps to get there instead of just a link. This could be overcome with some clever url’ing and some information on each page saying how to link there but it’s pretty rare to see that happen.
Flash also removes your standard browsing features. For example, when the text is long you get a scrollbar, but if it’s done in flash you can’t use your mouse scroller or arrow buttons to scroll down. I find this annoying to no end. I now hate having to drag a scrollbar down to read a long piece of text. Maybe I’m lazy, but it’s standard and I’m used to it. Flash also likes to live in a preset size, so everything lives in a fixed height box. This is great for designers, since it gives them constraints and allows designs to be made very precisely, print designers, I suspect, especially love this. But again, this breaks the paradigm of the web constraining you in ways that the web historically has not.
I think flash is a great technology that lets you do some incredible stuff. At the same time I think it is not “of the web”. It, in many ways, breaks the web and the way you use the web. No longer can you scroll with your mouse or hit the back button in your browser or do any of a variety of things when flash takes over. There are obviously different ways you can use flash on your site and like with everything there’s no free lunch. As the prominence of flash increases you are making tradeoffs that you need to be conscious of.
In many ways javascript is much more a creature of the web than flash is. While you can break many web fundamentals with the heavy use of AJAX, everything still remains browser based. Of course, as with everything, there’s tradeoffs when deciding to go heavy with javsacript instead of flash. Sanity, being one thing, javascript not being the most cross browser friendly of languages. And html/css for presentation presents a lot of problems for complex activities.
Anyhow, visiting that site just started me thinking and congealing a couple swarms of thoughts I’ve had over time about the use of flash. So there it is, my congealed thoughts.
