Flash Rocks!
When 9 months ago I wrote the article "8 Main Reasons for the Demise of Flash" over at Fadtastic my goal was not to get rich and famous but to stir discussion. Still in love with my former darling Flash I haven't lost all hope. Maybe her father Adobe would make her love me again or rather make me love her again?
Indeed I knew that he wouldn't so the article was very pessimistic. Nonetheless I promised at the end of it that I would write a follow up describing the cases where Flash does make sense indeed.
Today I noticed a hugely popular blog post at the social news site I love to hate: Digg.
It was called plainly "Flash Sucks" or in the Digg teaser version "Why Flash Sucks" and garnered over 2000 diggs in less than 19 hours after being posted.
What the hell? The guy, apparently Mike, whose blog I like and knew earlier, this time wrote a really repetitive and clumsy post recounting some well know facts of those I presented in greater detail last year.
So I decided to compile the 7 cases where Flash really rocks!
- Flash Video/FLV is the only platform and browser independent video format that makes sense nowadays and works without a fuss. Every Youtube-like Site uses it.
- Photographer's sites in HTML/CSS look like galleries in old supermarkets. They lack the flair of Flash. I still love Flash sites for photographers.
- Decent fonts! Ever used Vista? The crappy font anti-aliasing is an offence to the eye of the reader! Ever tried to shut it off? Then even the XP-like anti-aliasing of headlines is gone so they look really Web 0.0. In any case most websites have ugly fonts on Vista. Flash or sIFR is the solution! sIFR is made in Flash of course.
- Non-grid layouts have become so rare as CSS is already proud of stuff like rounded corners. In Flash you can really design. Flash sites astonish me still after 10 years on the net. I love clean CSS designs for their simplicity, but my heart beats faster when my eyes rest upon the beautiful rounded forms of Flash interfaces.
- Hollywood movies, the major ones at least, always have an animated Flash website. In some cases it is overloaded and annoying but in many cases I feel overwhelmed by the creative movie sites.
- Car sites that show the cars from different angles, animated and with zoom functions rock although I ride a bike and use public transport.
- Flash is great for SEO! There is nowhere so much to do for search engine optimizers as with Flash sites. People who can afford Flash sites also can pay well for SEO. In most instances the results are great as Google really almost ignores Flash so after creating a parallel HTML version the clients are satisfied.
Now you see that Flash rocks in several cases. So crash my server! I'm on shared hosting. Of course Flash is not dead yet as a whole. The focus simply changed.
I love sIFR and FLV for sure. But from a developer standpoint, Flash isn’t open. Maybe I just suck at Actionscript heh.
I suck at programming whether it’s Actionscript or not so I was glad to get back to coding HTML and CSS. Besides, a website does not have to be a movie or a piece of software ;-)
I still haven’t given up on Flash support for SVG though…
Mike,
SWF specification for Flash Player 9 SWF and FLV files were released about a week ago.
http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/
SWF specification for Flash 8 is available for almost 2 years now.
If you need to take a look under the hood – Flash parsing engine Tamarin is available freely at Mozilla’s developer repositories
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/
I’m a developer myself. I code in HTML, PHP, Ruby, Python and AS2 / AS3. Flash has at the moment the most powerful client side scripting language having the biggest reach (2.3 billion computers) (Yes, and JS has ugly browser incompatibilities).
I also don’t agree with the way you compare things, best HTML sites with worst Flash examples? Is that right? Did you try to find any worst HTML sites just to see how ugly it can get?
One thing that really disappointed me is that most of the people regard flash as “large files, slow loading”. It really depends on developers and most developers use predefined components or video elements in their designs that increase the swf size. Laziness? Maybe.
I build components myself so the output file even for a large portal never reaches 200kb (graphics included).
I don’t want to get into a discussion on FLASH vs HTML, but just try to think of flash as a tool to do business – it’s really what it’s all about. With it you can create stunning visuals, interactivity, and integrate media. All faster and easier than other languages.
Client’s love it.
@Mike:
“My goal when I wrote my Flash post was not to piss people off.”
With “Flash sucks” title? ;)
I don’t understand you enough:
“I can’t parse it”
Because it’s compiled landuage, like Java. But nothing stops you from write your AS parser. Especially in AS3, when Flex goes fully open source. There are Java classes for compile AS/MXML. With AIR now, it’s “just” porting code from J to AS;)
“decode it”
http://www.buraks.com/asv ?
“hack it”
http://haxe.org/hxasm
“improve it”
Just like JS for eg. But you still have powerfull base in native code, that allows you to write SQL, or FTP libraries…
“extend it”
How extend refers to improve?
From Flash Player view SWF is realy close format: you cannot add your opcodes, etc. I don’t know Java but it’s probably the same here: you cannot do more than VM allows you.
From SWF file view: it’s really open and clear format: almost like HTML, only in binaries. You have tag hierarchy, clear structures, and everything is explained in specs…
regards
Maciek
»Client’s love it.«
yeah, but clients are generally stupid … ;)
Totally agree with what you have here. And I’m glad you realize Flash works well for SEO. Most people are too ignorant to know you can do it, and do it well with Flash.
Alex: This time I was a little ironic, but in fact I will publish a list of Flash SEO tutorials soon.
[...] project and creating another one. I want to concentrate on #3 as there are still some cases where Flash rocks, even when the site is done completely in Adobe [...]
Yay, my photography site (click my name) is almost entirely Flash! I did what i could to optimize it but in reality it’s not going to get search traffic anyway, more like word of mouth, facebook, stumble and other links.
I think more of a case-by-case analysis would tell you if flash sucks or not for the intended purpose.
ive never seen a flash (only) site rank for anything other than what’s in the one pagetitle.
happily theres a flash developer going round ahead of us throwing up new ones faster than we can rank the last one, and not discussing the “i want it at the top of google” issue with the client until they realise that it’s not “at the top of google”
& long may that continue :)
Hello “seoibiza”. I appreciate your comments and I don’t mind users name dropping as long as you mention your real name like described here:
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/dofollow-blog-commenting-netiquette-vs-a-barbecue-party
If you are going to do a good job of website optimization for SEO then you need to only use flash where it makes sense. You put usability/crawlability first then worry about flash.
“Car sites that show the cars from different angles, animated and with zoom functions rock although I ride a bike and use public transport.”
Thats what I call unnecessary visual info.
“People who can afford Flash sites also can pay well for SEO. In most instances the results are great as Google really almost ignores Flash so after creating a parallel HTML version the clients are satisfied.”
I’m impressed someone that said this released publications about this issue. We all know that flash is not necessarily expensive, not necessarily beautiful or ugly. But I must say that flash SEO is a well known problem and a parallel site is not (many times) a viable solution. It costs money, time to make a parallel site, and as a worker in this area, I can say it’s not easy to make costumers realize the importance of this solution. If I were a costumer I’d rather focus on creating link anchors in other sites than waste my money on a parallel site that no one will see with repetitive info, although i’m aware and recognize the importance of SEO (much more than some users of this blog, as I can see by some comments).
They’re aimed to marketing and to costumers whose business relies more in looks than in info.
This bickering leads nowhere, Flash won’t replace HTML nor HTML will replace Flash.
[...] project and creating another one. I want to concentrate on #3 as there are still some cases where Flash rocks, even when the site is done completely in Adobe [...]
I love Flash.
If I had my way, there would only be Flash … Why?
Apart from Wiki sites, rarely are there any ‘engaging’ sites made with anything else.
AS2 has been heavily criticized in the past, fairly so in some cases … but AS3, I believe, is THE most elegant scripting language and if you fancy yourself a programmer – surely this should be your first/only choice.
It is a one stop solution (ok apart from attaching to a database, where using a server script is more secure). Why use competing technologies, bolting CSS onto AJAX onto PHP on to … yawn, where you have everything in one language working perfectly.
As a designer? It should be your first port of call… how else can you realise your designs? Silverlight? Nice … but that’s more for developers and hasn’t taken the world by storm as MS would have liked.
Although AJAX allows you to load content dynamically … Flash has been doing this for years.
SEO, is pretty easy to do in Flash, more so now than 18 months ago, it doesn’t take much effort to do … depending how far you want to take it.
Flash is also the best/most efficient way to incorporate video; music; animations, etc. and as a user (I am not speaking as a developer/designer) this is what I want expect from a site.
Link it with PHP and you have a fabulous front end for databases.
Flash is a no brainer … get over it and get on with it and the internet experience will be a far more rewarding place to be. As a user – that is what I want my few hours a day on the internet to be.