Top 10 things Flash developers don’t want you to hear - by Dave Collado

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Aaron Waldon 01.05.08 at 7:49 am

It appears to me that the author feels threatened by Flash. I am a professional web developer that programs in a variety of languages, including Flash, and I can assure you that Flash merits it’s value. Here is my rebuttal to the author’s claims:

10) The fact that Flash can deliver video and sound across browsers is amazing. Video and sound are an excellent way to deliver certain content. Who wants to read about a product when they can watch a video of it, or interact with some of its features? As far as long load times, well-designed sites are not that bad. Flash can stream videos and content so the user does not have to wait for the entire file(s) to load. YouTube boasts enough hits to show that people are interested in seeing more than just html on a page. Also, flash has vector rendering capabilities that are incomparably smaller than render graphics. Flash sites can be used to present media content with less bandwidth than straight HTML.

9) You could be at the mercy of Flash developers forever? You could be at the mercy of HTML developers forever. If you are going to make a change in any web language, you will need someone capable of making the change you desire. Whether the language be ActionScript, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, asp.net, XHTML, CSS… However, when designing sites for my clients, I tend to make my content driven Flash applications run off of external XML files that are read at runtime. Even a novice web developer with no understanding of Flash ActionScript could make the needed changes in notepad and not have to recompile the swf file.

8) The “Back” button is usually disabled? I think you are using the word “usually” very loosely here. Just because you might have seen a site (that happened to have Flash on the page) with a disabled back button does not mean that Flash is to blame. As a matter of fact, you cannot even disable the back button in flash. The “meta refresh” you are referring to is implemented in HTML. You might as well say that all Flash sites have pop-up windows, or white backgrounds.

7) Once again, a rather asinine assertion. If you are developing a website for your company, you can choose to not have an intro, or to leave an option to skip the intro. The same holds true with sound. Moreover, Spash Pages can favor your visibility, as good flash sites have “alternate” content in the source code. Flash automatically generates two separate places in the source code for alternate content: the first is for content that will render if the user has lower than the latest version of Flash and the second is for those that do not have JavaScript enabled. This content is visible to site crawlers. Description and keyword meta tags and other SEO techniques can also be implemented to provide the site description and keywords to the Search Engine.

6) I have never used SWiSH, but if Flash is as bad as you say it is, why would you want to recommend another program that will accomplish the same thing?

5) Well, we definitely do not want to make you think, but forms are not that hard to follow in Flash or HTML. You input data in one or more input fields and then you hit a button that submits your data.

4) Once again, you can design sites with HTML fallback for those with accessibility issues. “True web accessibility can be best described as the ability of any user, regardless of disability and or web browser, to access the same content and information.” Really, than does that mean that we cannot have pics in a website because someone with a screen reader cannot see them? Does the alt tag in the HTML really allow them access to the same content? So should all websites be text based only? Do Google Maps, Gmail, and other AJAX/JavaScript rich applications need to be thrown out too? They might not function if JavaScript is disabled or someone is using a text browser…

3) Maybe you should research this stuff a little more before trying to author a paper on it. I bet you have never used Flash, right? Refer to comment #7.

2) Flash templates are great for your site, and for your competitors’ sites that bought the same template you did! I do not know if you have ever purchased a template, but they are actually difficult to customize without any knowledge of ActionScript. Plus, they have limited design and functionality–what’s a company website if you cannot create it to meet the specific needs and goals of your business? Besides, why are you recommending Flash templates when you have been trying to convince everyone of how evil Flash is?

1) Just so you know, flash is actually on 98.8% of internet-enabled desktops in mature markets (see adobe’s site: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/) and worldwide ubiquity for Flash Player 9 (the latest version) is 93.3% and Flash Player 8 is 98.4% (see adobe’s site: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html). Most Flash sites are not made in the latest version anyways, and the Flash plug-in is backwards compatible.
My point is, do not believe everything you read in an article written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about. Flash can be implemented very responsibly and professionally. It can attract repeat visitors to your site and present your content in refreshingly creative and interactive ways. It definitely has its place among the web technologies.

2 Collado 01.08.08 at 1:46 am

Thanks for the comment you have obviously put a lot of thought into this and I like the points you made. Considering your goals I think you did a great job. Frankly I don’t have anything against Flash persay, in fact I have always said that when used judiciously Flash can be quite ingenious and practical, case in point as you mentioned You Tube which uses Flash to stream videos and content so the user does not have to wait for the entire file(s) to load. That is wonderful!

However this doesn’t contradict the fact that the great majority of Flash designers have a tendency to make many fundamental mistakes (e.g. letting the “cutting edge” detract them from the basic principles and practicalities of good design); moreover sites such as You Tube only reinforce my views on the sense and sensibly of Flash usages. I believe that Flash is a tool the same as HTML is a tool but the excellency of Flash is in the developer’s good judgment of usage. Not in allowing sheer possibility to override form, and practicality.

In other words, don’t confuse CAN with SHOULD or overzealously put WANT over NEED every single time something pops into your head letting it detract you from what the client has asked you to communicate. For example I’ve thought it might be cool to make some type flash rewind/fast forward interface that would play that sound Fred Flintstone makes when driving his caveman car by putting his feet below the car and running on the road. Cool? Yes! Necessary? No.

That any given user has a version of the Flash plug-in is indeed correct, I never said anything otherwise. In fact if I remember right, Flash was being pre-installed by 1999 so, chances are most of your audience is using a computer purchase since then. However, just because the latest plug-in is backwards compatible does not mean everyone already owns the latest version of the plug-in or, gives a rat’s ass what a plug-in is or even what Flash is.

Bottom line is you don’t know which version of the Flash plug-in the user has so, the users will just use whatever their computers came with and should that just happened to be incompatible with your swf publishing settings (e.g. player version and or Action Script version) she’d be a little disappointed. Wouldn’t she? But, thanks all the same for those most up to date stats from Adobe on the Adobe plug-in. I did not know that! You know what else is 98.8% don’t you? The amount of HTML used at Adobe.com to tell you that the Flash player is on 98.8% of internet-enabled desktops. Isn’t that something?

As far as the long load times, well-designed sites are not that bad??? Just so you know a recent report in the 2007 Broadband Update, which looks at the current state of broadband adoption in the United States showed that 47% of adults have high-speed Internet connections at home as of early March 2007. So, would you define for us what you mean by “not that bad” in minutes, as it pertains to the other 53% of Americans still using dial-up? Before you answer you may want to consider that Web sites are all about getting the USER to their goals as soon and as easily as possible, not about YOU having cool technology just for the sake of technology.

Maybe you should research this stuff a little more before trying to author a paper on it. Hmmm I never would have thought about that but since you mentioned it, I did a little research and according to our pals over at Google:

“Yes, Google indexes pages that use Adobe Flash. However, our crawlers may experience problems indexing Flash pages. If you’re concerned that Flash content on your pages may be inhibiting Google’s ability to crawl your site, you may want to consider using a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site. If features such as Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.”

They also say I should consider following:

“You may want to consider creating HTML copies of these Flash pages for our crawler. If you create HTML copies, please be sure to include a robots.txt file that disallows the Flash pages in order to ensure that our crawler doesn’t recognize these pages as duplicate content.”

Really? Cause Aaron Waldon assured me all I had to do is add some keywords meta tags and he’s a professional web developer that programs in a variety of languages, including Flash. Are you sure?

You might want to go to this link:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35267
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Consequently due to the fact that an entire website can be contained in a single .swf file whereas a traditional HTML site may consist of hundreds of individual pages, the weightings and rankings given to certain pages may be less than or equal to 0 (e.g. this Web site http://www.aaronwaldon.com/ ironically named after you).

So the first thing you should ask yourself before doing anything in Flash is, why not HTML? And if you can honestly justify to yourself that it serves a genuine purpose then, knock yourself out, otherwise freaking chillax! With that been said, don’t assume just because someone else does not share the same opinion as you they automatically don’t know what their talking about.

3 Aaron Waldon 02.24.08 at 10:46 am

Well, if nothing else, I think you are a funny guy. I laughed at the “e.g. this site” comment. That site is a one page portfolio website that gets hits off of links from my resume on sites like Monster. It is not intended to be a site with “hundreds of individual pages” with a CMS. You can hate if you want, but it gets me more high-paying work than I have time to keep up with, and not just “customizing” cheesy cookie-cutter templates like this site does: foamers.net. But my congrats on your BUSINESS having a page rank of 4/10.

In all honesty, I do feel bad for the first post I previously left, because it was a little harsh. It was late and I guess I was irritated because a lot of the information in the original article that was posted was exaggerated or just inaccurate, but we have already been over that. For what it’s worth though, I apologize for discrediting you rather than just correcting the inaccuracies of the blog. Now that the personal quips between us are resolved, back to the issue at hand…

As far as Flash goes, I agree with you 100% that it needs to be used judiciously. I recently advised an organization to convert their Flash site to PHP and to use a content management system. I am not advocating a new internet that is Flash only. I am simply saying that Flash does have its rightful place on the web and is advantageous to implement in a variety of circumstances. I think we both agree on that point. That being said, there are a number of terrible and malformed Flash sites out there that are unbelievable resource and bandwidth hogs. I hate to admit it, but a couple of my first sites were really heavy and took forever to load. But when sites are modular and load external content, their functionality can become asynchronous while the rest of the resources are loading. Even if a lot of material is being called to load, the loading of the resources can be staggered so that everything is not trying to be loaded at once.

As far as you asking me to define for you what “not that bad in minutes means”, it means that when sites are designed using vector graphics, rather than embedding raster graphics in the .fla/.swf files themselves, they can be a fraction of the size of a normal image and take only a few seconds to load. Once again, something we both agree on is playing to Flash’s strengths. Flash also has the ability to stream both audio and video, and the user only has to wait a few seconds for the buffer time before the content starts playing, and the rest of the file will continue downloading in the background.

I am very familiar with how Google works with Flash content, and that is what I was describing in point 7. It has become very apparent to me by some of the comments you have made such as, “Bottom line is you don’t know which version of the Flash plug-in the user has so…,” that you do not understand what I am attempting to convey to you. Let me give you a brief overview/tutorial of how a search friendly Flash page that caters to your user can be achieved in 3 simple steps. And since you are such a funny guy, this one is free of charge.

Step 1: When you are finished designing and/or coding your Flash movie, go to File -> Publish Settings. Click on the HTML tab and check the “Detect Flash Version” option. You should set this to the lowest possible version that supports the code used in your movie (ActionScript 3.0 cannot be lower than version 9).

Step 2: Open up the HTML file in the HTML text-editor of your choice. You will notice that there is a section of JavaScript code that detects the users Flash Player version. If they have a version equal to or higher than the version you specified in your Publish Setting in step 1, the Flash .swf file will play as planned. You will also notice that there is a place in the js code that reads something to the effect of “var alternate content = “”. If the user has an older version of Flash than specified in step 1, then this content will be displayed instead via JavaScript (remember to escape quotes in the variable using backslashes). This is where you can include the Flash movie’s content in HTML, and it is completely readable by robots and site crawlers.

Step 3: “What if the user’s browser does not support JavaScript?,” you might ask. Well, that base is covered too. Just under the JavaScript section discussed in step 2, there is an opening and closing tag. You can also put all of the alternate (HTML version) Flash content in between these tags. This serves as a second fallback for Flash.

In summary, if the user does not have Flash, or the version of Flash is too old, then the alternate JavaScript content you defined will try to display instead. If the user’s browser does not have JavaScript, then the “noscript” content will display. Moreover, you have the HTML version of your content being read and indexed by the site crawlers twice! This content can also be styled using CSS like a traditional web page. You can even go so far as to use the same CSS stylesheet to style your Flash and your HTML, but that is a lesson for another day.

Since you pointed out my portfolio in your response, I found a couple of minutes today to populate the two Flash fallback locations in the HTML to serve as an example for this post. You will notice that if you disable JavaScript in your browser (very easy to do with the “Web Developer” toolbar extension for Firefox, or by going to Tools->Options->Content in Firefox and un-checking the “Enable JavaScript” box) you will see an HTML version of the page. Moreover, if you rollback to an older version of Flash or disable Flash (which can be done with the “Flash Switcher” extension for Firefox) with JavaScript enabled in your browser, the alternate HTML you provided in the JavaScript section will be displayed.

In my portfolio, both the Flash and the HTML are XML driven. Lee Brimelow has some excellent tutorials at www.gotoandlearn.com on how to use XML in Flash. For the HTML, you can use some very simple PHP to read the XML. In my site, I wrote the following PHP function to read the xml file:

$theText = “\n”;
// Using SimpleXML, read the file into memory:
if($xml = simplexml_load_file(”portfolio.xml”))

The $theText variable is inserted in the code in the “portfolioItems” div in the noscript section discussed in step 3, and the $noWhiteSpaceText variable is inserted in the “portfolioItems” div in the JavaScript alternateContent variable discussed in step 2. *Note: This PHP function is written for servers that use PHP5.

So anytime I want to add a new portfolio item, I simply update a line in the XML file, and the Flash and the alternate HTML are automatically generated for me. The vast majority of my users can use a more engaging Flash version of the site, but if there happen to be users whose browsers do not support the needed version of the Flash Player or have JavaScript disabled altogether, they will see an alternate HTML version of the site. And best of all, the search engine robots/crawlers can index all of the HTML content…twice.

I hope this walk-through helps you to understand what I have been trying to convey to you, and that it answers some of the questions that you have regarding flash. I acknowledge that there are still some drawbacks of using Flash vs. HTML. Every site should have a careful cost/benefit analysis of using a given technology before it is implemented. For one, it is harder for programs like Google Analytics to track your user’s mouse clicks, as it cannot “see” the internal links in Flash. Like we have both consented, Flash (as with any web language) needs to be used wisely.

Regards amigo, and good coding to you with your newly found Flash expertise.

4 Aaron Waldon 02.24.08 at 10:54 am

Half of the PHP function got munched when posting, so here is a link to the entire PHP document with a .txt extension: http://www.aaronwaldon.com/thephp.txt. I hope this is helpful to you and others.

5 Collado 07.11.08 at 4:07 pm

hello stranger,

I thought you might get kick out of this oneFlash Technology Enhances Search Results (I Don’t Think So!)

Leave a Comment

Name

E-mail

Website

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Anti-spam word: (Required)*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Furl
• Netscape
• Yahoo! My Web
• StumbleUpon
• Google Bookmarks
• Technorati
• BlinkList
• Newsvine
• ma.gnolia
• reddit
• Windows Live
• Tailrank

E-mail It

• To Address:
• Your Name:
• Your Address: