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1. There are a million small disadvantages to using proprietary plugins, it is not "the internet", google can read flash, but not well, you dont have firebug, y

1. There are a million small disadvantages to using proprietary plugins, it is not "the internet", google can read flash, but not well, you dont have firebug, your site cannot be scraped, these may not all affect you, but there are lots lots more. 2. The flash plugin sucks on most browsers, its a slow unreactive user experience, compare a few full flash sites to their equivalent in javascript. 3. Flex's layout constructs are similiar to pretty much every widget manager around, are in no way close to the power of xhtml/css, I for one didnt find it enjoyable at all to develop for. how long have you been doing html/css? its a pain that goes away quite quickly, if it hasnt, I would ask some more experienced developers to look over your stuff and see if anythings being done wrong. and you might want to look at graceful degredation, if ie isnt a particularly large chunk of visitors, your exact problems are very easily solved in a way that very gracefully degrades (-moz-border-radius:, font-face:)

teej 17y ago
1 - This is a completely valid point. There are tradeoffs in build a site in Flash. You have to put extra work into being crawler friendly - something you get out of the box with HTML/CSS. 2 - Depends on what you're doing. Animations definitely run smoother and with less resources in Flash than they do in HTML/CSS. 3 - A lot of Flex's layout capabilites "just work" out of the box. You don't have to figure out the complexities of the box model and you don't have to know the intricacies of floats. You just say "I want a container that positions things horizontally and I want them to be aligned on the top of the box" and it does it. Flex's components I have found are incredibly hard to precisely skin. Then again, so is HTML if you don't have experience in it.
- sunkencity 17y ago
  re 2 - I disagree. On a powerful computer flash is OK, but on let's say a Core 2 duo 32 bit and an intel i950 graphics chip, almost any flash will take one of the cores to 100%...
  - teej 17y ago
    And the Javascript equivalent wont?
talleyrand 17y ago
No Firebug, no life...
poppysan 17y ago
2 of your 3 points are purely opinion, so agreement will vary from person to person, but I disagree with number 2. Flash player is not so popular because it doesn't perform well. It perform great. One of the best sources to deliver video and complex interactivity such as games available. People always attribute the low barrier to entry of flash (7you can crank out a bad website or animation quickly) to the speed and quality of the flashplayer or actionscript/mxml. Honestly, there are many more bad html/css and java sites than flash. To make a long rant short, quality flash/flex can provide just as good (and oftentimes better) UX than anything else.
freddier 17y ago
Actually, you DO have Firebug and in a very powerful way: http://labs.findsubstance.com/2008/02/26/firebugs-console-log-flash-debugging-made-easy/ http://labs.findsubstance.com/2008/02/26/firebugs-console-lo... http://snook.ca/archives/quick_links/quick_link_debug_flash_with_firebug/ http://snook.ca/archives/quick_links/quick_link_debug_flash_...
- daleharvey 17y ago
  thats a tiny tiny part of firebug, the lack of the ability to introspect the code makes it virtually useless (dom inspection, profiling and tracing, this is also the same problem relating to seo and such)
  - freddier 17y ago
    hu? There is profiling and tracing (actually is native if you have Flex Builder on debug mode). And DOM inspection doesn't make sense in Flex. And you can have SEO in Flex easily. Check it out: http://www.google.com/search?q=listen+to+free+music+online http://www.google.com/search?q=listen+to+free+music+online

teej 17y ago

1 - This is a completely valid point. There are tradeoffs in build a site in Flash. You have to put extra work into being crawler friendly - something you get out of the box with HTML/CSS. 2 - Depends on what you're doing. Animations definitely run smoother and with less resources in Flash than they do in HTML/CSS. 3 - A lot of Flex's layout capabilites "just work" out of the box. You don't have to figure out the complexities of the box model and you don't have to know the intricacies of floats. You just say "I want a container that positions things horizontally and I want them to be aligned on the top of the box" and it does it. Flex's components I have found are incredibly hard to precisely skin. Then again, so is HTML if you don't have experience in it.

sunkencity 17y ago
re 2 - I disagree. On a powerful computer flash is OK, but on let's say a Core 2 duo 32 bit and an intel i950 graphics chip, almost any flash will take one of the cores to 100%...
- teej 17y ago
  And the Javascript equivalent wont?

talleyrand 17y ago

No Firebug, no life...

poppysan 17y ago

2 of your 3 points are purely opinion, so agreement will vary from person to person, but I disagree with number 2. Flash player is not so popular because it doesn't perform well. It perform great. One of the best sources to deliver video and complex interactivity such as games available. People always attribute the low barrier to entry of flash (7you can crank out a bad website or animation quickly) to the speed and quality of the flashplayer or actionscript/mxml. Honestly, there are many more bad html/css and java sites than flash. To make a long rant short, quality flash/flex can provide just as good (and oftentimes better) UX than anything else.

freddier 17y ago

Actually, you DO have Firebug and in a very powerful way: http://labs.findsubstance.com/2008/02/26/firebugs-console-log-flash-debugging-made-easy/ http://labs.findsubstance.com/2008/02/26/firebugs-console-lo... http://snook.ca/archives/quick_links/quick_link_debug_flash_with_firebug/ http://snook.ca/archives/quick_links/quick_link_debug_flash_...

daleharvey 17y ago
thats a tiny tiny part of firebug, the lack of the ability to introspect the code makes it virtually useless (dom inspection, profiling and tracing, this is also the same problem relating to seo and such)
- freddier 17y ago
  hu? There is profiling and tracing (actually is native if you have Flex Builder on debug mode). And DOM inspection doesn't make sense in Flex. And you can have SEO in Flex easily. Check it out: http://www.google.com/search?q=listen+to+free+music+online http://www.google.com/search?q=listen+to+free+music+online