My name is Alex Gilman and I'm a Flashaholic. I have a disease and they don't know what to call it. Better hide your wallet, cause I'm coming out quick to strip your cash. Bought a ticket to a trade show just to play with Flash. ...ok ..ok I'm done rhyming.

C'mon its your turn to speak now. What do you think?

Yes, let's talk about design.

As a web builder and artist/designer whose clientele runs from artists to industry to medical to finance, I find these "pronunciamentos" (proclamations) on what "should" be and what must "never" be done rather amusing. I concentrate on effectiveness, period, and I think a little common sense and a recognition of the purpose of any particular website are in order. And these pendulum swings (only usability counts; Flash is evil -- yes, apparently someone actually said that!) give us, in my opinion, an incorrect view of things. They read well as rather alarming articles, but are they true? Because I like true; I like effectiveness; I like what works.

I think the highly-deplored entry to the Web of print people and ad agencies vastly raised the minimum standards for website "look and feel". Looking back at 1997-98, I think we needed that. Don't you?

Print people: their sites were beautiful but were slammed mightily because of their alleged insistence on exact placement. I say "alleged" because I don't know ... has anyone actually looked at their code to see if this is what they're doing? And is configuring a site for an exact screen resolution and exact placement intrinsically bad in every last case? Yes, a little search-engine friendliness is good and necessary, but I do not find anything intrinsically wrong with beautiful and I know that these can exist together.

Ad agencies are supposed to be bad because ... well, you know, they're just bad. End of story. (Huh?)

Then we had: only usability counts, and everything else -- including any strictly "design" functions -- is bad. Yow. Mr. Plain Vanilla, home of the 10-Minute Website Layout. And yet, there is a major, major lesson to be learned from usability. Let's face it, regardless of the topic of a website, websites are about communication, and one cannot communicate effectively if one is "speaking some other language," as it were -- so if you're doing a business site, I think it had better be pretty darned obvious to the end user. You want to sell something? Don't hide or confuse the darned links! But if you're doing a design site meant to communicate to other designers, that changes the whole game, doesn't it?

Flash: I have not forayed much into the land of Flash. And, while I can see problems with Flash usage, these have existing workarounds, so what is the problem? A "skip intro" button, no use of ActiveX for ActiveX-disabled browsers), alternate html pages handle most of this. I have to admit that I'm not a fan of lengthy downloads that flash interminable numbers of words onto the screen one after the other ... if it's a business site, speed it up, buddy -- get to the point! And yet it's terrifically clear that much can be done with Flash, and I don't think any one of us can argue that Flash designers have not again raised the standard for web design. But that is another, longer, discussion.

Alex, sorry I went philosophical on you. But I think that, as much as we may be intensely involved on a daily basis with content and ad copy, file size, applicability, usability, search engines -- many or most of us are artists, and this is what drives us. I also think that, even as we design specifically for our clients (and their clients), our work also communicates to and influences other designers. And, while I am never a proponent of design (or art) devoid of considerations regarding what the site is about, I think that is a reality. And a little discussion of these pronunciamentos is in order. It couldn't hurt.

Flash, while allowing motion, audio and interactivity, is also to my knowledge unsearchable both within a site and in the search engines. This severely hampers the usability of a site- if someone's on your site, they are there for some purpose, and every avenue possible should be open to them in achieving that purpose.

I agree that messaging is extremely important, especially for corporate websites, but this can be accomplished in ways that do not compromise usability. Jakob Nielsen, while it may sound like he advocates barebones sites, actually has a lot to say about iconography in site design and his latest article on Flash actually discusses some of its advantages and how to avoid the pitfalls.

So to me, it appears that Hillman is jumping in to the image-based fray, hoping that search technology might catch up (This seems to be the attitude embodied in the article) some day and make it work better.

1. The text effect on that portion of the site can be easily achieved with CSS. Thus allowing the text to remain text.

2. I really don't think Curtis is too worried about recieving clients from search engines

I personally think that there is a time and place for Flash. I don't want to repeat what everyone elses is saying. So I'll keep it brief.
One of my favorite things to do with Flash is to make it work flawlessly with an HTML page. I think most will agree that 20k of Flash can be more compelling than a 20k Gif animation. (Look at an example made by "the man"). An idea would be to: make a certain part of your Navigation bar Flash with a seamless transition into navigatable text based links.
If someone doesn't have Flash then a gif of your vector based masterpiece will reside in its place and everyone is happy right?

And: Where's the bloody readability?

That color combination (and font size, and choice of fonts) was no doubt carefully chosen for a visual effect, and the visual effect was, "If you try to understand this, you'll get a rip-roaring headache."

Some people might interpret this as, "Oh, aren't those deep thoughts, to be so difficult to see?"

I interpret this as, "If he had cogent arguments, he wouldn't be afraid to let people see them!"

>>"This could have been done with CSS"

Yes. And it should not have been done at all. That page -- whatever its putative merits -- is a very powerful argument that, even in the hands of a designer more sensible and experienced than most, Flash exercises a significant deleterious effect.

Paint it over your server room door, and bleat it three times each day before starting web design work:

"Portability good!
Proprietary bad!"

"Generic good!
Hardware-dependent bad!"

"Markup language good!
programmed graphic effects bad!"

Give the devil his due: Flash not pure evil. It is really harmless and helpful -- except when it is used.

But I have spent 20 years either designing for, or suffering from lack of, portability.

And I also keep ActiveHex turned off. Now _that_ is pure untrammelled evil.

"I thus recommend that Web designers interested in enhancing usability and their site's overall business presence use Flash sparingly."

Notice that he doesn't say, "not at all."

Here's the flip side: http://www.zdnet.com/tlkbck/comment/381/0,8055,100448-611350,00.html

[This message has been edited by DianeV (edited 03-20-2001).]

• Sites that are marketing their talents in video or any kind of moving picture. What you can pack into a Flash file (or a Java Applet) compared to a digital video like mpeg makes Flash a great choice for sites promoting video editing skills, advertising development skills, things like that.
• Science sites often use Flash (or Java) to create moving pictures of processes that are difficult to explain in pure text, and don't need to be, thanks to tools like Flash (and Java).
• Kids sites with games use Flash (or Java) so that games and sounds and music, characters can even TRY to compete with the visual candy of TV. Kids gaming sites that use interactivity to stick kids to their sites use Flash (or Java) to make that interactivity immediate.

On an interesting note, see OpusLife's post about Flash and the search engines: http://searchengineforums.com/Forum29/HTML/000516.html