
Why your Flash website sucks - nickb
http://glyphobet.net/blog/?p=206
======
gruseom
This is a good and substantive piece that is better than the tone of its
title. The question it addresses - html or Flash? - is one that we really
struggled over, and I would like to hear others' stories of how they made this
decision. So here's mine.

We want to compete against established desktop software. UI is critical to us,
and there's no way that an html-based UI is going to be as slick or performant
as what we could do in an installed program. So the prospect of getting a
richer and (presumably) easier to program UI out of Flash was very enticing.
Yet in the end we decided against it.

What settled this in my mind was asking, How central is the web to what we're
trying to do? Do we want our app to work roughly the way a website does? Is it
natural to model it as a series of "pages" represented by URLs, connected by
hyperlinks, and so on? Or is this an artificial imposition on our problem?

In our case, the question has a clear answer: making our product work roughly
like a web site is key. In fact, the more it works like a website the better:
our users need to navigate complex graphs of information, and the web is the
established model for that. We want our new stuff to work in a way that users
are already familiar with (albeit from a different context, namely web
surfing), so as to keep their learning curve as low as possible.

So "webbiness" is an essential part of our product, which should therefore
speak the native language of the web. The last thing I wanted to end up having
to do was write an ad hoc, informally specified implementation of half of a
web browser in Flash. Users would know that they weren't looking at "real" web
pages, and it wouldn't feel right. So when I hear about people hacking their
Flash app to support URLs and so on, I feel relieved we didn't go down that
road.

On the other hand, the decision we did make has caused our programming efforts
to become swamped by the minutiae of divs and doms and Javascript. We're
hacking a platform that was never intended for what we're building. That
sucks, too. And it has slowed us down. But I will say that making this work,
and work well, in a web browser has been exhilirating.

Edit: the other thing I wanted to point out is that this webbiness criterion
also holds if you look at the successful Flash apps: games, video, photo
editing, and so on. These are not problems where it would make sense to
structure the solution like a web site. I'd be interested in hearing
counterexamples to either side of this.

~~~
greendestiny
I choose to do my web application in flash for exactly same reasons that lead
you to html and css. Its all interaction and not navigation.

I actually think the mixing of content and interaction that web applications
have become is incredibly powerful - I think the idea that we'll prefer
desktop style buttons and widgets over text links is wrong, very very wrong.
And I think that's where most of the reluctance for flash apps comes from but
people don't recognise it. Also web pages progressively load by default and
thats important.

On a purely programming tip, actionscript 3 is a joy to program in. The flex
components are good.

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sah
_People know what to do with native widgets. Use them. Don’t make your users
think._

This excellent quote summarizes the article nicely, and explains why good
graphic design is so often at odds with good user experience design.

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hhm
_Sorry to break it to you, but your Flash website sucks._

I think the author of this article is being unnecessarily mean with the author
of that website. He has a point, but that's not the way to tell it IMHO.

~~~
tx
I think he is not being mean enough. Personally I've taken even more radical
position towards flash-only web sites: they endanger all of us, because
they're going with a closed, proprietary platform over open standards,
allowing (ultimately) corporate agendas to dominate the WRL "web runtime
library". The author of the original flash site is an asshole. Here, I said
it.

I don't want to live in the world, where I will be forced to install Java(FX),
Flash and Silverlight (all fatty runtime downloads) _in addition_ to perfectly
fine HTML/CSS/JS.

Think of how much pain will it be (already is) to introduce new and innovative
web-hardware, like an iPhone. You'll be at mercy of Adobe/Microsoft/Sun to
release their stupid players for your architecture. And yes, by the way, Adobe
prohibits you from reverse-engineering their player.

~~~
hhm
He's an asshole because of the technology he choses to publish his own
content? How can you say that? That's a very personal attack against a person
that is making a very personal choice to publish his own content. I think you
could only attack him if the content he published was of a different nature,
say scientific data, government documents or general public stuff. But he can
share his own data the way he wishes too, and I don't think you have the right
to call him an asshole for that.

I understand the sum of personal choices can generate a problem for the
general population, but in any case you can't attack the individual choices:
you can't either regulate them by law (as in many other cases where individual
choices get regulated for society's common well), or just let them be.

~~~
mxh
'Asshole' is strong, but tx's points are valid. I, too, much prefer the open
web, and resent anything that promotes the adoption of closed alternatives.

You're right that one can't fault a guy _too_ much for picking the tech. he
likes best, but it's hard not to have a certain distaste for someone who's
actions, however slightly, move us closer to a day when we'd be forced to use
proprietary tools/protocols/servers to perform most tasks on the Internet.

As developers with this view, of course, all we can do is work to make the
'open' alternatives as attractive as possible. Calling people 'assholes' isn't
helpful. Cathartic, though.

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jdavid
Summary: replacing HTML with flash is lame. its like making a movie out of a
videogame, or a book just because you can.

if you are going to adapt something for a new media, you should do it because
you can provide an exponentially better interface than HTML can provide.

HTML sucks at vector graphics, file unloaders, consistency, user interfaces,
animation (although this is getting better), creating playful experiences.

Flash on the other hand flash is a perfect complement for HTML, its good at
vector graphics, file uploads, consistency, user interfaces, animation, and
playful experiences.

Both flash and html suck at taking advantage of any computer built in the last
2-4 years, and are missing the emerging web of 3d, and semantic applications.
Cross domain policies are making it harder to design web apps than it needs to
be.

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redorb
I bet his html version of his site does 10x better in search engines than the
flash. The only decent use of flash I see for the full site was Pandora (and
even then i would prefer the player just to be in flash)

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wallflower
I have an idea for a Flash-content search engine. It would require SWF
reverse-engineering (something like aspects for Flash) and advanced Flash
screen scraping. And I'm not sure it's technically feasible.

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tel
For limited use of varied typography you can use flash very selectively by
using Sifr (<http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr>)

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poppysan
i agree with most things this guy says except the use of gif animations. they
are clunky and large, at any decent size and defeat his previous statements
about speed. Flash has great multimedia benefits and appear exactly the same
cross browser.

Sure if you only have text and images, you might want to use html/css instead
of frustrating your user, but there are many sites which fully utilize flash
in an efficient manner.

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SwellJoe
Summary: Your Flash website sucks because it's a Flash website.

~~~
gruseom
Can I make some copies because I have to make some copies? :)

<http://tinyurl.com/2udsgm>

