4 ms·

Why your Flash website sucks

20 points by nickb 19y ago

hhm 19y ago
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 19y ago
  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 19y ago
    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 19y ago
      '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.
    - tx 19y ago
      "Asshole" was harsh, I take it back.
  - hollerith 19y ago
    I agree that flash-only web sites endanger all of us. I unistalled my flash player, and it would take a compelling application indeed which has no HTML/CSS/JS equivalent to induce me to reinstall it.
sah 19y ago
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.
redorb 19y ago
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)
poppysan 19y ago
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.
jdavid 19y ago
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.
tel 19y ago
For limited use of varied typography you can use flash very selectively by using Sifr (http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr)
gruseom 19y ago
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 19y ago
  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.
wallflower 19y ago
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.
SwellJoe 19y ago
Summary: Your Flash website sucks because it's a Flash website.
- gruseom 19y ago
  Can I make some copies because I have to make some copies? :) http://tinyurl.com/2udsgm http://tinyurl.com/2udsgm

20 points by nickb 19y ago

hhm 19y ago

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 19y ago
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 19y ago
  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 19y ago
    '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.
  - tx 19y ago
    "Asshole" was harsh, I take it back.
- hollerith 19y ago
  I agree that flash-only web sites endanger all of us. I unistalled my flash player, and it would take a compelling application indeed which has no HTML/CSS/JS equivalent to induce me to reinstall it.

sah 19y ago

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.

redorb 19y ago

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)

poppysan 19y ago

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.

jdavid 19y ago

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.

tel 19y ago

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

gruseom 19y ago

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 19y ago
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.

wallflower 19y ago

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.

SwellJoe 19y ago

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

gruseom 19y ago
Can I make some copies because I have to make some copies? :) http://tinyurl.com/2udsgm http://tinyurl.com/2udsgm