I am aware that this rant has probably graced these pages before, but I will go mad if I do not vent a little frustration.
If you are a website designer, please immediately and totally renounce Flash. It is truly horrible. My work involves a lot of fact-checking. I have to visit a lot of websites. I do not want to watch some wanky intro video - which, more frequently than not, fails to load altogether leaving a white box with three little cubes in it, or else loads, flickers for a fraction of second with a tantalising glimpse of some actual real information before loading again, and repeating the process ad infinitum.
The web is the most wonderful means of distributing information ever devised. It was designed to be platform-independent - you could read text on it (or have it spoken to you through a text reader etc) no matter system you are on. HTML does these things. So why oh why must you torment us so with the promise of information which you so cruelly fail to deliver? Why should we have to attempt to install a new version of Flash every few months just so we can watch the doodlings of your frustrated inner cartoonist?
So, next time a client says, “Ooh, and can we have one of those cool intro videos too?”, be firm. Say “No, it will make all your potential customers think that you are utterly clueless, and what’s more it will annoy the heck out of my good friend r_k.”
If there is some pressing reason why you must include Flash - say if the client has kidnapped your child’s pet rabbit and is threatening to do nasty things to it if daddy doesn’t make his pretty website - then please please please make sure that there is an easily accessible (ie not Flash-coded in itself) link to a plain HTML version of the site, where we can actually find some information.
No I disagree r_k. If the client has kidnapped your rabbit, just let them do nasty things to it. I know that’s going to hurt, but it’s better than using flash.
No no no! My rant is not restricted to videos. Flash often does not work altogether. It no doubt works fine on the web designer’s 1.6GHZ Ultronium PC, with all the pages stored in disk cache, but for those of us in the real world, even when we supposedly have the correct version of Flash installed, the multimedia equivalent of the white box with the little red X is a painfully common sight. There are perfectly efficient ways of making menus in HTML, so why not use them?
Flash, javascripts, shockwave, they can all go to hell.
If you want to actually diseminate useful information, use HTML. It works. It was designed from the ground up to work. It assumes nothing other than a browser that can understand simple commands. It is good.
If you want to create a multimedia entertainment page, I may forgive you for using flash. Otherwise, you seem to have rather missed the point of this whole intermaweb thingamibob.
A straw poll of my office concerning Flash produced the following results:
70% completely unprintable (sample comments included “string the f****** micro-scooter-riding, combat-trouser-wearing c***s up by the headphones of their Nike MP3 players”)
There is a time and a place for flash. Without it we would not have the genius that is Weebl & Bob, nor rathergood.com.
But it is NOT for corporations. Intro pages to corporate sites suck arse. Everyone clicks the “skip” button anyway: nobody watches the whole thing. And if you do the rest of the site in Flash, making it unsearchable, non-indexable, and non-referenceable, well then, you are a total fucking idiot.
Using Flash on corporate sites is a way of saying to your investors: “we’re wasting your money on a stupidly large marketing budget. We make bad decisions.”
And the attitude that says that web-users should be “competent” is living in denial. When I’m designing GUIs I always get “well the users should know how to configure that using the register - DUH” from developers. End users are thick, and if you’re trying to appeal to the widest possible market, then you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Flash sucks. Give me a website with basic HTML. Hint, only children are impressed by your fancy animation and whatnot. Everyone else just wants the information they came for and would rather not deal with fucking Flash.
Lamest rant ever. What is this, 1999? What’s next on your list of complaints, you don’t like VHS? Flash has grown up as have most of its more serious users. Gobshites are still gobshites. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Blah-di-blah.
Even the (other) master, Jakob now says Flash is a very useful creative tool in the right hands (while still conceding of course that a dipshit with flash is as pleasant as a dipshit with javascript but moreso). There is a time and a place for everything. Cept this rant.
I am prepared to accept that there is a place for Flash (and it is a place that I do not ever wish to go). But surely the whole non-proprietary ethos of the web, as originally envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee, demands that people should offer an HTML-only version of their site, as a courtesy to those who either don’t have sufficiently advanced technology to view Flash properly, or just plain don’t like it.
As for the argument that “everyone can see Flash OK now, those who can’t are living in the Stone Age”; well, I work for one of the biggest print media companies in the country and I have no end of trouble with it.
I should just like to add that the day the SDMB implements a “new and improved” Flash-only version is the day that I burn my modem and go to live in a cave.
“Most of its more serious users”? Who are they? Certainly noone I’ve ever come across.
Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML for a reason. And that reason didn’t even begin to contemplate stupid fucking intro videos and non-searchable, non-referencable, non-indexable information.
You are wrong, in every conceivable way. Flash is shite, always has been, and always will be. It’s use in anything other than the aforementioned humour sites should be punishable by, oh, I don’t know, being tied to a pole and shot with a blunderbuss loaded with your own shite or something equally unpleasant.
Progress is bad, innovation is baaaaad!
Of course the information should be available in plain html, of course it should be available in formats that reach the majority of users. That should go without saying, but because of a lot of unserious web-devs and companies/orgs that don’t know their ass from their elbows, it doesn’t go without saying. These are the same people who do not dev their online presence in ways that are compatible with screen readers either.
As for Tim, I don’t think he in his wildest dreams concieved what the internet would become.
