#comments

Yesterday I was browsing the internet checking out an online furniture catalogue that shall remain nameless. *cough*cough*. Not least of the problem was that clicking on the link to get their opened it in a window that was sized to fill one of my 23″ screens. It then proceeded to have the absolute worse conceivable flash interface making it impossible to quickly see what was on offer and check out the details. I spent a few minutes on the site and then just threw up my hands and shut the window. Awful.

Flash and Javascript are great enabling technologies. They let you do a ton of things that you didn’t used to be able to, I mean, when I was growing up all we had was our html’s and we used to code p tags without a closing tag! Unfortunately, they give you plenty of rope to hang yourself with.

In many ways when they are heavily used – that is when they take over the user experience – they fundamentally break the web. Sometimes the problem is that they break the user experience, I can’t use my mousewheel to scroll or increase the font size. Other times I want to remember something in particular, but I can’t copy and paste or even worse bookmark the page I’m on.

This turns out to be a major problem for the search engines. Just this morning a came across a slew of pages talking about how Adobe’s working hard with them to make this a little more transparent, Google’s already rolling this out – Yahoo’s still cranking on it.

But if you look into this, it’s crazy talk. What the solution is is a special player that will simulate user interactions, clicking buttons and entering input. So basically, all your flash apps are going to get a workout by monkeys banging on their keyboards. Will contact forms be spammed by Google? Contest entries entered by Yahoo?

Beyond all that though, what good will that do? Sure they can index all that content, but what are they going to link you to? The front page of the app, there’s no where else to do it, unless Adobe can provide a magical way to create a url that magically simulates all the random button clicks and text entry that G had to do to get there. It will be as though you search for some news topic and Google links you to the New York Times home page. What good does that do anyone?

I don’t know, maybe I’m just cranky because I’m looking for new furniture and it is hella expensive. But, that crap bugs me. I suppose it is better than nothing, but it seems to me that it is not that much better. I’m sure I’m missing something, though.