Yes, very helpful. I still think it boils down to crappy website design and not the tools, but some very good pro html points have been made here.
And here’s yet another reason to switch to Mozilla:
Flash click to view
Granted, I’ve only been using it for about 5 minutes, but it replaces every flash process on a web site with a link, and doesn’t start the flash animation until and unless you click the damned link. I wish I would have went looking for this days ago, so more people in this thread could have seen it.
Here’s another note about the whole “bad designers” thing: Even if most of the problems are, in the end, the fault of the designer and not the tool itself, it’s still “flash’s fault”. Macromedia should be publishing tools that make “best practices” simple to accomplish and lowering the learning curve.
Take Java, for instance. Class variables should only be read and written to by class member functions, so in the Eclipse IDE there’s a function to automatically generate getter and/or setter functions for whatever variables you want. All functions should have javadocs explaining them, their parameters, and their return functions. in Eclipse, you can select a function to generate these templates. To make readable code, there are spacing and newline conventions that should be followed, in Eclipse I just have to hit shift-ctrl-f and it auto-formats for me. Reused bits of code should be in it’s own method and called from several places. In Eclipse, it’s refactor->extract method and it does it for me.
In short, I’m writing better code than ever before, because the development environment makes it easy for me to do so. If Macromedia doesn’t make it easy to write good flash code, then they must take some of the blame for “poor designs”.
-lv
And how exactly is Macromedia to prevent long intros, mystery meat navagation, and the use of sound?
Off the top of my freaken head (note, I have no flash-authorship experience, and no experience with curernt flash-authorship tools):
Prevent long intros: Provide an intro-page-generator to provide an html skeleton into which developers can easily plug their own intro into. But the skeleton automatically inserts options to download and play the intro or skip to the main page.
Mystery Meat Navagation: Provide standard navagation objects for internal flash links and add code for them to be bookmarkable, open in new windowable, and have saveable addresses which can jump into the proper location of the swf file. Still allow the actual drawing of said objects to be customizable, but have easily-understood reference drawings available to be used by developers.
Use of sound: This is entirely Macromedia’s fault, by employing a system that doesn’t remember user preferences. If there was a global flash control panel (for instance) object that allowed me to say “don’t play sounds unless I say to”, I wouldn’t care how many sounds a website used, I wouldn’t hear them.
-lv
You could do all that and more, (templates bring their own headaches btw), but Macromedia still can’t prevent humans from building the crappy sites you are railing against.
Not my point. Humans are lazy creatures. If you make it easy for them to create good code, you’ll get good code. If you make it easy to create bad code, you’ll get bad code. If you make it equally easy to create good and bad code, you’ll get equal amounts of good and bad code.
Now, if there are tools to easily create good code, and certain developers decide to intentionally make obnoxious things in spite of that, there isn’t much Macromedia can do in that case. But the current ratio of crap to good Flash, and what Flash developers in this thread have said about the learning curve and Swish and such, imply to me that Macromedia actually mades it easier to write bad code, and that’s where I’m saying that it’s “flash’s fault”.
-lv
This is a known fact? What the hell does this have to do with anything.
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No I think you mean…
If you make it easy to create code, you’ll get bad code.
Try saving a word doc as html and look at the file produced.
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Lots of ifs being thrown around. What the hell are you talking about anyway?
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Not nearly as “good” as the code a knowledgeable human who takes pride in their craft would create.
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No I guess Macromedia can’t excercise creative control over the subjectively obnoxious content their product creates. Looks like you got me there.
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Well, it’s not Flash’s fault so get over yourself and look where the problem lies, with hack developers.
Perhaps if you had the reading skills necessary to understand a paragraph as a whole instead of trying to guess the meaning in each of it’s sentences, you’d understand my point. But apparently, you think that because Word sucks as an html editor, no code generation tool in the universe creates good code.
And I’m not even talking strickly about code generation. I’m talking about the ability to write “good code”. Code generation of trivial things that everybody hates manually coding (like the getters and setters of my previous example) can be a part of that, but library routines and good development tools play their own role.
Bullshit. Are you telling me that no real java developer uses Swing classes because they can “code them better themselves”? The whole point of libraries and templates and Object Oriented Programming is to have ONE TEAM of expert programmers write highly efficient, highly usable routines that lesser programmers can take advantage of in their own code, without the lesser programmer having to know how to do the more complicated task.
Every computer language has standard library functions. Some don’t have enough functionality (in C, for example, you must implement your own linked list if you want to use such a thing), and that leads to lesser programmers coming up with their own implementations that, quite frankly, usually suck. I’m inferring from the steep learning curve cited for flash that they also do not provide enough standard functionality. And that’s the definition of a steep learning curve, the more knowledge the system expects you to have, the steeper the learning curve. You lower that curve by having the system do more for you.
That’s the part where I was offering common ground with you, ass. Fuck it, I’m out of here.
-lv
World Eater, you aren’t going to seriously argue about the statement that humans are lazy, are you? Perhaps YOU are highly ambitious and motivated but if you honestly don’t believe that humans are lazy, then I honestly don’t believe you have ever left your parents’ basement.
And why does this matter? Because humans take the easy route. If it takes more effort to make good code than bad code, then guess what - you get bad code.
World Eater you were having an argument above with LordVor, in which you made the point that there is only so much that Macrovision can do to stop Flash being used inappropriately.
But at the same time, you say that the problem is not Flash itself.
To me, those two points are in direct contradiction. You are saying in the one breath that Flash is a good tool but also that it is, of its very nature, one that its designer cannot safeguard to an extent sufficient to prevent it being used mostly to the detriment of end users.
In this attitude you are about 30 years if not more behind the times in terms of thinking about design. Modern design does or should take into account not just how powerful a tool might potentially be in the hands of an expert, but also (and more importantly, really) how it will actually be used by the actual people who are going to use it.
And on that basis, Flash is a bad tool. Period.
I think we may have different definitions of good code. My definition is going through line by line with all possible fat trimmed off. I know of no code generator that allows me to skip that process, and from what I’ve seen some of them make it far more tedious.
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Sure they play a role, but still, I don’t blame Visual Basic if I run across a shitty app.
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No I’m saying that people people should have the knowledge to tailor the code to their app, or at least possess basic optimization skills.
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You’re the one blaming the expert programmers for something the “lesser” programmer created. I know many people that use Dreamweaver yet they barely understand html, and on the other hand I know people that only code html in notepad. Care to guess who builds better sites, inside and out?
There’s a difference between knowing how to do something and understanding how it works, and that’s what makes one person an expert and the other not.
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And whom do you blame for that?
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Flash does not have a steep learning curve at all, a point that’s been proven with the abundance of crappy flash sites out in webland. I installed flash, went to a few tutorial sites and was tweening away in 10 minutes. If you are too stupid or lazy to do that, then you shouldn’t be using Flash.
Sure, go ahead lower the learning curve all you want, it still won’t change the fact that the same people are lazy and stupid.
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Well you have a strange way of offering common ground.
Sure I will, it’s a dumb comment, painted with a broad brush, that has no basis in fact.
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Some, not all are lazy.
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Some people still take pride in a job well done. I know it’s a wacky concept, but hey, we live in a wacky world.
Well I think the inclusion of safeguards that will funnel the designer into creating a certain type of content is silly, but YMMV.
Like everyone, I’ve seen flash used in good ways and in horrible ways. The same goes for html, java, dhtml, etc, so I guess flash is a bad tool in the sense that all tools are capable of being bad tools at some point or other.
As other posters have mentioned, that are some technical reasons that flash may be inferior for some use, and I agree.
Why stop there? Why not go through the compiled output byte-by-byte re-optimizing the output? The arguments you’re giving against code generation are the exact same arguements that people made about compilers and computer languages in general 20 years ago, and it’s the exact same problem, translating from one language to another. It’s insane to propose that one translation is possible and the other is not, people stopped re-optimizing compiled code because the compilers got better.
Generation was a side-issue in the debate anyway. I never meant to say that it’s currently useful for anything other than removing tedious tasks for the developer, leaving him more time to concentrate on important tasks. If you want an example of how that’s possible without sacrificing performance, try using Eclipse or IntelliJ for your next Java project.
And we do have different versions of good code. Good code:
- Is readable. Follows common conventions WRT spacing and descriptive variable names.
- Is maintainable. Code is modularlized such that new functionality can be added to existing program without re-writing the whole tihng. Code is well documented so that it’s clear what tasks are completed where.
- Is reuseable. Common tasks are written in such a way as to be shared across many projects, and it doesn’t count if you have to copy the code form one file and put it into a different one, that takes away from the ability to maintain code.
- Is optimized.
You have to balance 1-4, if you just cut out “all the fat” you end up with unreadable, unmaintainable, non-reuseable code.
-lv
Because you don’t do this with html.
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So compilers got better, what¡¦s the big fucking deal? Do we have world peace? Has lady Di risen from the dead? The applications being compiled can still be poorly designed and riddled with buggy code, and 20 years from now Dreamweaver will use it’s new and improved code generator to generate shitily designed websites.
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Important tasks like that really cool long intro I bet.
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Eclipse and IntelliJ are tools, like flash.
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I agree, but what the hell this has to do with anything is news to me. A html file can be all nice and tidy, stripped of all extraneous code and even have a few indents to boot, yet what the user sees can still suck eggs. So what if the code to my shitty navigation is perfectly optimized, the navigation still sucks!
I don’t know what tangent you are going off on, so let me try to summarize.
The design of a website lies entirely on the designer, no one else. They make the choice as to which tools they will use (flash, dreamweaver, notepad, javascript, etc), as well as which aspects of those tools they will use.
When a designer starts a new site, they have a blank canvas.
Whether it’s flash or Html is a decision they made themselves.
What navigation scheme they use is up to them
The colors incorporated into the interface are up to them
The inclusion of sound is up to them
The inclusion of a long ass intro is up to them
The fonts used are up to them.
Unless Macromedia strips flash of it’s basic functionality, they’ll never be able to control the content their product creates to the degree that would seem to please you.
A hammer can build a house or kill a person, and the whole point of this stupid argument is not to go blame the people who made the hammer.
Well, the OP was complaining about the use of flash in websites, not that flash was a bad tool. I agree with the OP. I don’t like flash in websites.
So it doesn’t matter if the Flash tool is the best deveopment enviroment in the world or a steaming pile of crap, I don’t like it on web pages.
Of course there are exceptions. If the website is geared around graphical content like a 3d games site, then flash is good in that instance. Or it’s your personal web page and the flash lets you express yourself better. But using flash for a restaurant’s menu is a bad use of flash in my opinion. Or this freediver’s site. Don’t have flash? Well, you can’t see any of the links or the sponsor’s logos. And even if you do have flash enabled, the flash animations take so long to show the naviagation buttons that you might think the site doesn’t have any.
So if you want to use flash to add some sort of flowing decoration in the border of your website, go for it. But if you use flash to enable critical navigation and information delivery, you better have a good reason other than “it looks cool”.
Leave Lordval and I to our tangents!
Actually I think everyone has said what they’ve had to say.
The same thread will pop up in a month or two anyway.
I’m not one to let a good tangent die.
Eclispe and IntelliJ are good tools for developing in the Java format, which lead to the easy creation of good Java code. Flash is a format. The main point that I’ve been trying to make is that there don’t seem to be good tools for developing in the Flash format that lead to the easy creation of good Flash code, and for this I placed blame on Macromedia.
I know that there are bad coders in the world who’ll write shitty code no matter the environment they’re in. I know that there are good coders in the world who can somehow manage to write good code using nothing more than Notepad (although why they choose to use the shittiest text editor currently in common use is beyond me). But there’s a whole hump of a bell curve of programmers that can create good code with good tools, but will create shit code if the only tools available are shit to work with. And the high volume of shit flash out there leads me to believe that the the flash development tools are lacking. And for this I blamed Macromedia.
-lv
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What a dumbass thing to say. The type of content that myself and others are arguing the designer should be channelled towards is content that does not annoy the hell out of users. You think that’s silly. Silly does not even begin to describe your position.
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Bollocks. You are neatly avoiding all sense of proportion. Amongst users, HTML is used in ways that makes it widely loved (despite whatever faults it may have) and Flash is used in ways that produces frothing at the mouth hatred from the vast majority of users (despite whatever good points it may have).
To suggest that they are both bad because both have good and bad points is like suggesting Hitler and the lollypop lady are both bad because the latter once kicked a cat. Get real.
I think you’re being wildly unfair to World Eater here - he’s not disputing the advantages of certain ways of authoring web pages, he’s just putting forward the fairly mild opinion that modifying a tool to prevent its use in silly ways is not the best way to go about things. Personally, I think education is the key. Professional web developers ought to know that flash is not ideal everywhere.
Flash is an interactive web animation authoring tool. If you’re so eager to deride World Eater as a dumbass, would you care to suggest how flash might be modified to stop the creation of stupid over-flashed sites without crippling its ability to create games? I’m presuming it’s pretty obvious, given the level of your scorn.