On Wednesday 16 August 2006 10:17, Bob Dove wrote:
Hi folks,
Will flash be the death of the internet? A company I do some PR work for has for the past two years employed a young 'whizz kid' (MD's son) to liven up their website. Has lots of 'flash' flash (the company do manufacture Studio Flash equipment) animations &c, but takes so long to load that potential customers move onto a competitors site in 'penny plain' HTML. Despite being told that the only people who can be bothered with flash are other website designers who do not buy their products they do persist. I suppose the MD's son has to be employed at something! What do ALUGers think. Are we getting too clever by far and missing the point?
Cheers,
BD.
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A couple of my thots on this, as someone who's made oodles of flash and director content.
These things stand in the way of Flash as a great "cross-platform platform" for me.
1) Let's point out first that it's not GPL (at least not in any fully functional manifestation). However, I'm not Microsoft and I can't complain about developers exercising their right to license under whatever legal terms they, personally, happen to like. If you don't like the license, etc.
2) Shocking standard of web development. Flash was (past tense*), given a browser that could support it (and any web developer expecting to support other browsers without alternative content to flash, images etc. shouldn't be doing their job), the most incredible mechanism for delivering cross-platform content, good accessibility for those with HCI challenges through disabilities etc., and most especially for low requirements of bandwidth and processor time compared to alternative methods of delivering the same sort of content.
The various mechanisms for all of these are laid out on a plate for even the most stupid developer to pick up and use, and a big reason for Flash movies failing to meet those obvious standard is imho that there are too many fly-by-night developers throwing up flash movies.
These people *don't* seem to test with alternative flash players in other browsers, or to test for accessibility (or even provide for it) and seem to be the kind of people who couldn't tell you what code they'd written 5 minutes later, releasing the most horrific hodge-podge of pasted-in actionscript from all over the web, much the same sort of thing you see with those terrible geocities pages once in a while that have 17 kittens chasing the cursor, bouncing pictures, spinning javascript titles, animated logos and bring your browser to a grinding, shuddering halt before you can kill them.
3) Developmental focus. There's too little of it, and without a clear and compelling reason and concise delivery, clientside java/flash/shockwave/js etc. are just a burden on the client.
4) *Adobe are now playing silly-buggers with cross-platform support for the player, and serious web entities are eschewing/moving away from flash already because Adobe have not understood and taken on the idea of flash as a cross-platform tool - *really* good idea amongst web/multimedia designers and developers who have about the highest representation of non-windows use there is, and choose what goes in web pages. Who knows, flash 12, for windows Vista and IE(7.5, dx11-compatible physics card required) only might be just as obscure as most other ActiveX-only plugins.
Anyway, no you're not alone, but I don't think it's flash's fault.
Ten.