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.
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 10:17:16AM +0100, 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?
Yes, mostly.
When I'm shopping on the Internet a site that uses Flash gets negative points immediately from me. If it has a button that says 'skip intro' then they go up a bit again.
I don't find that there's a *lot* of Flash used yet, at least not on the sites I seem to go to.
On 17-Aug-06 cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 10:17:16AM +0100, 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?
Yes, mostly.
When I'm shopping on the Internet a site that uses Flash gets negative points immediately from me. If it has a button that says 'skip intro' then they go up a bit again.
I don't find that there's a *lot* of Flash used yet, at least not on the sites I seem to go to.
-- Chris Green (chris@halon.org.uk)
I don't think it will be the death of the Internet, but I agree that it's becoming far too intrusive. I think that Bob's and Chris's point that people will shift their attention away from over-Flash-y sites is the more likely trend in the future.
Flash certainly has its place -- as in the very entertaining
(a lot more to this than meets the eye ... a very complex design), but all too often it is indeed pure visual bling.
I find it specially annoying when it is used in advertising slots on newspaper websites. I quite often read various newspapers on line, and it increases the load time, can slow down computer response, and is distracting (which I suppose is the intention). When the advertisers catch on that people more often react negatively than positively (if that is the case ... ) then they'll change their approach.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 17-Aug-06 Time: 10:04:34 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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?
I've said my bit:
http://ironchicken.livejournal.com/1006.html
;-)
Its the information hiding that annoys me most. I don't have the official Flash plugin installed, and GPL FLash is quite limited. Flash should be reseverd for arty/designy stuff thats /additional/ to the main content of a site.
Cheers, Richard
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 10:17:16AM +0100, Bob Dove wrote:
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
TBH, this question seemed to be being asked more about 6 years ago, imho it seems that unnecessary usage of flash (and java, and other weird+wonderful plugins that shouldn't be used for content that could be done in plain html) has dropped very much in the past few years and people are getting their sites working in more browsers without plugins.
Thanks Adam
See - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baloney
As otheres have said, there seems to be less of it. I think more companies are waking up to the fact that flash-only is saying* to customers on hand-helds, old hardware or running old versions of flash - f*** off, we don't want your money.
Possibly, they also check the numbers of people clicking the [SKIP INTRO]. When this hits 80% (I don't think I've sat through an intro yet), the PHB's might begin to wonder what exactly they are paying this wonderkid designer for.
Besides, another point, which the Wiki-article raises, how much flash is on the most viewed web page on the planet?
* or rather, screaming in the ears like an enraged drill sergent.
MT Morton
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School of Computer Science | Everything is linear if University of East Anglia | plotted on log-log with Norwich | a fat magic marker.
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On 8/16/06, Bob Dove b.dove@virgin.net wrote:
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.
I use the "FlashBlock" plugin for Firefox which lets me choose if and when I see the animation.
The bad thing about overly graphical websites is the lack of copy and paste. You'd be surprised how many companies put their email address, phone number and postal address in an image.
As said abovr, if you collect statistics on Flash avoidance, we'd also be interested in the results :-)
Tim.
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:08:48PM +0100, Tim Green wrote:
On 8/16/06, Bob Dove b.dove@virgin.net wrote:
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.
I use the "FlashBlock" plugin for Firefox which lets me choose if and when I see the animation.
The bad thing about overly graphical websites is the lack of copy and paste. You'd be surprised how many companies put their email address, phone number and postal address in an image.
There is of course a valid reason for doing that, it prevents 'address scraping' by spammers. (There are other more friendly ways of doing this I know)
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:12:23PM +0100, cl@isbd.net wrote:
On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 12:08:48PM +0100, Tim Green wrote:
On 8/16/06, Bob Dove b.dove@virgin.net wrote:
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.
I use the "FlashBlock" plugin for Firefox which lets me choose if and when I see the animation.
The bad thing about overly graphical websites is the lack of copy and paste. You'd be surprised how many companies put their email address, phone number and postal address in an image.
There is of course a valid reason for doing that, it prevents 'address scraping' by spammers. (There are other more friendly ways of doing this I know)
Also makes it less accessable, unless they've set the alt text to that, and then they've no longer got that "advantage" of getting rid of address scraping ;)
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.
Bob Dove asked:
Will flash be the death of the internet? [...]
No, but it will be the death of many companies' attempts at using the internet. Everyone has been told for years that accessibility matters (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/ first published 1999 with a couple of years of drafting before that), but it's only today that a multitude of non-PC access devices and mass use of the web are driving the issue home.
<span class="rant"> The trouble is, how do you convince the sponsors that the problem is "our use of Flash sucks" rather than "the web sucks"? You can show them sector trends or competitor case studies, but there's always some other difference available. People will refuse to believe and there's more than enough web developer cowboys willing to charge more and produce less accessible sites - I know because I've been seeing this many many times in Norfolk since starting out again in 2003. Too many purchasers are like little children let loose in mummy's make up: they want to plaster on the slap because then they'll feel like something's different. Unfortunately, it's that they look damned ugly. </span>
This has been happening long enough that now I'm doing fairly good business going along with good free software tools (tidy, sed, sitecopy, fuse and so on), removing some of that excess cosmetic and adding really useful things (like phplist, osCommerce, NIMKS and so on) to their sites. Sadly, I'm often hampered by customers not demanding the basics (like READMEs, Changelogs and SSL private keys) from cowboy developers, so I'm probably going to start a series of 'buyer's guides' on one of my sites about that soon. Or has someone more authoritative done it already?
Regards,
-
Adam Bower -
Bob Dove -
Brett Parker -
cl＠isbd.net -
Mike Morton -
mjr＠phonecoop.coop -
Richard Lewis -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Ten -
Tim Green