Re: UKNM: Flash

[Sam Carrington]

Preventing user access to a site without plug in X is obviously a self

defeating promotional strategy, however, offering alternatives, and

notifying the user of the potential of extended content is a way that

content providers can increase the uptake of extended technologies such

as Shockwave. i.e. default the user to vanilla HTML, but let them know

there is a flashed equivalent (although if you can see the content

already, the likelyhood of users waiting even longer just to get some

bells and whistles is debatable).


The use of flash should always be driven by content which is relevant to

the technology - Sense have used it successfully in a number of our

sites, where the task could not easily have been acheived otherwise.

Where an HTML equivalent is possible, we provide it, but the Flashed

experience is often so much richer that it more than justifies its

presence.


Designers new to the field and eager to flex their flash 'muscles' are

frequently blind to the basic requirements of web design - accessibility

is always key. It isn't just 'flashed' sites which are guilty of this

(ALT tags anyone?). 


Thus it is often designers who have transferred from other media who are

guilty of the cardinal sins - although this, of course, is something of

a generalisation.


Fat GIFs, >200kb Flash, no ALT tags, poor interaction. All these

elements go hand in hand to ruin user experience of a great many sites,

Flashed and otherwise.


One of the advantages of well made flash presentations is that downloads

can be staggered; content can be streamed seamlessly as and when

required. Unfortunately there are still some - albeit very good looking

- sites out there which do not make full use of the streaming

capabilities of the technology.


Often clients ignorant of the true limitations of the web can be sold

all singing all dancing flash movies because they get a good WOW factor

themselves, and are not knowledgeable enough to see the down side (until

they get back to their offices and try and see the content online of

course).


However, fractionally extended wait times alone should not be a reason

to abandon tools like Flash altogether, I mean, Java compilers can take

an age to kick off, but is anyone abandoning applets? Looking at

shockwave.com shows you that users can be offered things to do while

movies load or have content streamed to them.


If the embedded object acheives a task which could not have been done

otherwise, and manages to restrict dead time to the absolute minimum, it

has got most of the way to being a successful project. There are things

flash can do which could not be done otherwise.


At the end of the day, we should use the right tools for the right job. 


To quote Jeff Veen (HotWired Style) - 

Say this out loud: "the web is not print, the web is not television, the

web is not CD-ROM"


So if you want a web site, employ web designers ;-)


-- 

      sam carrington  //  web designer  //  www.sensei.co.uk

Speechradaol [dot] com

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