Why it is Best Not to Use Flash Unless You Really Have to
A few years ago all anybody in any industry wanted was an all singing, all dancing website built in Flash. Look around now at all the big sites. Is the entire site Flash? (No but some little bits might be). Look at all the database driven sites – Flash does after all work well with databases. Are any of them Flash? No. In fact the only sites you will find entirely coded in Flash are certain webcam sites, peoples personal homepages, one man business sites, some music and art gallery sites and thats about it. Why?
Well after all the fuss and furore died down people realised a few things:
Firstly search engines cannot read any of the keyword loaded text included in your Flash page, you can make a mirror site in Text only mode but you must remember to maintain it – a major pain.
Secondly anybody usng a non-standard browser, a text only device, a surfing aid for the blind, many Mobile browsing solutions or surfing via a data-mining tool cannot see your sites content at all.
Thirdly most implementations of Flash and databases are horridly insecure. A Script Kiddie (let alone a real hacker) can siphon off the whole of your database via a poorly written Flash object.
Fourthly its very expensive to keep your Flash Software and Licencing up to date, and despite being theoretically easy to maintain, in practice Flash sites often prove difficult to update for all sorts of reasons.
One apocryphal industry Anecdote tells of the commisioning of a large and important Flash site. It was internally tested by the customer and approved, then went live. Four days later after hundreds of user complaints the plug was pulled and the site taken down. Why? One of the 19 year old whiz kids developing it was a heavy metal fan and had attached his favourite MP3 compilation to the SWF file so that he could have music while he worked. Needless to say all the managers who tested it had no sound card fitted or habitually surfed with the sound switched off. Users who came across the site who were equipped with working sound were treated to Megadeth at 110 decibels. Since the site was dedicated to selling Church consumables such as Altar Candles, Vestments ….
So the drift away from Flash began. Some people wrote small applications (called widgets) in Flash and strung them together using HTML and PHP. Some people dropped flash altogether and scaled back their graphical ambitions. The most successful used AJax techniques in Javascript, image maps, and CSS/Javascript animation to build pages as pretty and functional as any Flash page.
These new pages are written using an HTML construct called a DIV in such a way that all the text they hold is exposed to search engines and data mining tools. Ajax routines (click simple ajax tutorial ) update the page without reloading it by calling PHP scripts using Javascript. Using CSS properties (simple CSS Tutorial) graphics and text may be changed, moved, or animated on the fly by Javascript routines. All data is supplied by well secured PHP routines from industry standard MYSQL databases. About the only thing Flash is used for on these sites is playing videos and some advertising content.
I hope this has given you an incentive to dig more into Javascript, CSS, and Ajax. It is the way to go at the momentwho knows what the future will bring?
Written by Mattinblack