Comments on: Podcast 29: The great flash debate

By: art portraits

art portraits — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 09:36:17 +0000

I can still remember my days with the Affiliate Marketing people. When working with affiliate applications, we would immediately decline any site that has flash. But now, everything changed and rules have become lenient. Even sites with sound or music along with flash were already accepted.

By: jewellery

jewellery — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:27:23 +0000

He he, great argument.
Whether flash is controversial or not, the truth is it is some form of standard. I don’t really know one person who doesn’t have it installed, to be honest. As far as design goes, Flash is not THE standard, but it is definitely a type of standard. Whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay, and it HAS made quite a difference to the way the web works.
In fact, I think the arguments FOR it were actually pretty strong :) But then again, it’s all about the middle ground, eh?

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:45:31 +0000

Just looking over the oldest notes on podcasts and decided now to make a html friendly site for other users to read. Thanks for the great podcasts, and keep it up!

By: bozboz web design brighton

bozboz web design brighton — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:52:21 +0000

Flash websites certainly seem to provide a much richer user experience in many cases, especially when combined with php or other scripting langauges to allow the content to be more dynamic. The whole search engine thing is the biggest problem though, surely there must be some way to develop text data in a way that can be spidered

By: Jim Cartwright

Jim Cartwright — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:32:40 +0000

Thats true you will get very heavy pages if you combine everything all into one. I have been using a javascirpt ro detect flash version and then automatically pushing people to either a html or full flash site depending if they can see it. Im not sure how this may work with search engines, but it seems ok so far, all our content is being fully indexed as engines find the html site, but users see the flash version

By: R Walker

R Walker — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:06:02 +0000

@ Jim: A very good point and it's good to see you practise what you preach with your own site. However your site is a pefect example of what is becoming a sterotype of most web design business's that use Flash heavily; there knowlegde of the fundamental HTML is lacking (your site is in serious need of a CSS file to minimise the repetition of inline style attributes on all your elements). Also I think it's probably a good practise to put your HTML alternative on a unique URL. Having the same content on the same page twice (in Flash and HTML) makes for a very heavy page. The browser, if it supports Flash, will still download the HTML even if it's not displayed to the user.

By: Jim Cartwright

Jim Cartwright — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 10:48:39 +0000

Blue Edge are a Multimedia Company Based in Brighton. We specialise in flash development for the web and make a lot of sites using flash, some full flash sites and some with disparate parts. I agree that using flash properly in the right context is very important, some good advice in this article especially about accessability. If your building a full flash site there should alwaysan HTML alternative for something that is a functional part of your site. If you combine this with a php database system it can be painless once the site is running to make sure content is avaialable in both sites

By: R Walker

R Walker — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 02:45:52 +0000

One of the biggest issues I have working with Flash in a large team of developers is it’s binary format*.
Flash, by it’s nature, makes you combine many, otherwise unique files into one file. So I Fred needs to change some text on pg. 3; he has to wait for Jane to finish with the button design, save it, transfer the file, Fred makes the change, and gives it back. Do this a few times and you’ll be asking who has the latest version.
Arguable the same could happen with a text file, so enter a version control system (CVS, SVN, etc). While text files are nice and small updates are a quick (re- network transfers), Flash source files (.fla) however are much larger. Along with this you loose the gift of ‘diff’ (to view differences in versions) and goo luck doing a merge if a few people make changes to the same file at once. You’ll also probably find that your version control system makes an entirely new copy of each binary file for each revision, where text file changes are tracked to save on disc space.
Another big pitfall for using Flash is you need the expensive OS restrictive tools to make changes. In the podcast Paul said that a contact had made a massive form using Flash on an Intranet and was all for it. Now imagine that a single field needed to be added to that form. In most big businesses the back-end developer on his Linux box could update the database thn easily and quickly edit the HTML (copy and paste and update an existing field) and the changes would be ready instantly.
With Flash, not only can the .swf not be updated, but even if the .fla was sourced, he’d still be out of luck as the Flash IDE does not run on Linux. And even if he was on Windows, he’d still require a licensed copy to be installed and then know how to use the interface and where to look for the fields. This is not something you could expect a back-end programmer to do, while a simple HTML change would not be something new to most programmers.
Above all this I think Adobemedia showed it themselves why Flash is not the best tool to use in a team environment with their switch of their newsletter from Flash to HTML. See http://mountainash8.blogspot.com/2006/08/adobe-staff-dump-on-flash.html
* I know you can pull out most scripting and bitmaps and include them at compile or run time – but you’ve just made more work for yourself and you’ll still be stuck with at least one .fla that needs compiling for each change.

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:41:41 +0000

You really have to be careful with what you make in Flash.

By: dan cave

dan cave — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:10:47 +0000

hi there im not sure if you will be interested or not but i recently had a meeting with one of the lightmaker.com directors. sorry not name dropping :P
however on his visit he was a little uptight about details but aparently his code wizzards have found a realistic meathod for indexuing pure flash websites in search engines. i thought you might want to know, its not really insider info but again it could be usful to someone like you.
anyway
thought i would let you know so it might help change your mind on flash :)
Dan