Websites using Adobe Flash have attracted a lot of criticism over the years, and understandably so. Flash websites break all the rules that make (X)HTML great. They (generally) exemplify poor usability and remain woefully inaccessible to visually impaired users, or those with low bandwidth. Browser support also remains a big problem. However, even those web designers unwilling to relinquish Flash for the aforementioned reasons have done so because Flash has remained inaccessible to all the major search engines, thereby causing serious problems if making your website discoverable is a key concern. Even my brother - historically a huge Flash aficionado - a few years ago conceded that Flash on the web was a bad thing – primarily because of the issues it raises for search engine indexing.
Still, if you look hard enough, you will find many that insist on using it. And these chaps will be pleased to learn that the Official Google Blog has announced that Google have been developing an algorithm for crawling textual Flash content (e.g. menus, buttons and banners, “self-contained Flash websites”, etc.). Improved visibility of Flash content is henceforth order of the day.
But to my mind this is both good news and bad news (well, mainly bad news...). Aside from being championed by a particular breed of web designer, Flash has fallen out of favour with webbies precisely because of the indexing problems associated with it. This, in turn, has promoted an increase in good web design practice, such as compliance with open standards, accessibility and usability. Search engine visibility was, in essence, a big stick with which to whip the Flashers into shape (the carrot of improved website accessibility wasn’t big enough!). Now that the indexing problems have been (partly) resolved, the much celebrated decline in Flash might soon end; we may even see a resurgence of irritating animation and totally unusable navigation systems. I have little desire to visit such websites, even if they are now discoverable.
The underlying problem here is between data and behaviour. You would use Flash I assume for 2 reasons, firstly to use the animation engines to make things pretty secondly to allow behaviour to take place in a standard environment (flash being on most platforms and browsers).
ReplyDeleteAs soon as something contains behaviour you can only understand it by it publishing some indication of that behaviour or by proding it to see what it does. All this bound to make it harder to extract meaning.
The problem thus is likely to be with 'web sites' that rely on graphics for their meaning (which makes accessibility hard) or which are realy applications that rely on processing a transaction or workflow to make them worthwhile. These things can happen in different technologies. Some of my guys are working on an AJAX version of an application (see http://laboratorycommunication.com/ go to demo). Although this application works (albeit in Beta) using standard html/javascript. I think it would be as hard to understand it as it is to understand Flash.