It’s a love hate thing: Flash - March 27th, 2007
No it’s not a bathroom cleaning product or a superhero, it is a widely used browser plug in that can do things from show animations to fully interactive websites.
The origin of Flash lies with a company called FutureWave who originally came up with the idea of using vector based animations on the Internet. This product was called FutureSplash and the software was bought in 1996 by Macromedia as a replacement to their Shockwave product.
The word Flash is used to describe both the Flash Player and the Flash Studio authoring software. Basically, a user would use Flash Studio to create a file that is then played through the Flash Player.
So why use Flash?
- You can create some very nice animations with little effort. You could create these applications using animated gif files, but the vector based animations in Flash give you much better control over your movies.
- Because Flash is vector based the files it creates are generally very small and therefore quickly loaded onto users browsers.
- Flash incorporates a programming language called ActionScript, which is a form of JavaScript. This means that complicated effects can be generated by code rather than hand drawing them in.
- Flash isn’t just used for animations. With a combination of Flash and ActionScript you can create user interactive applications from web sites to games. Some very impressive applications can be created.
- When a Flash animation is created it creates files with the .fla extension. When this animation is published Flash Studio compiles it and creates a file with the .swf extension. This means that it is possible for content producers to stop people from stealing their work. Some companies create programs that can decompile a swf file, but the same companies also create programs that can stop decompilers working.
However…
- Playing Flash files in the past was a troublesome affair as many users didn’t have the player installed, and couldn’t get them due to the speed of their Internet connection. Nowadays things are a lot better, but they are still far from perfect. So if you create a site entirely in Flash you may be cutting out a lot of people from your site. This is also true if you create a flash menu system for you site as users without flash won’t be able to navigate.
- The main thing that is important to any search engine optimisation company is that the contents of Flash files can’t be seen by search engines. So if you were to create a site in Flash alone any search engine spider would only see the contents of the header tag, no matter how much content you have in your Flash files.
- It is used to create some very aggressive and intrusive advertising which are more crippling to the user than JavaScript pop-up windows. This has lead to the development of browser tools that turn off Flash on websites unless otherwise selected by the user.
- Getting hold of Flash Studio to create the animations is an expensive business costing up to and over £500.
- When a blind or visually impaired user visits a site that is extensively created using Flash they will have a very hard time navigating around the site as their screen readers and Braille displays won’t work. The advent of Flash 6 included many accessibility features, but the problem was that site designers had to actually use them as they were turned off by default.
The bottom line is that Flash has its uses, but don’t rely on it. If you can create the same effect in pure HTML then you should do that. If you can’t then you should think carefully about whether you need that effect in your site anyway.
