The big Flash scare
During website planning meetings, it has occasionally struck me how much misunderstanding there can be about Flash. While Flash advocates sometimes overstate its benefits, at the other end of the spectrum, others sometimes dismiss it too quickly. The truth is, like most tools, Flash is neither good nor bad, but has a proper place in a web designer’s arsenal.
First, there are a few semantic differences between the way developers and their clients talk about Flash materials. For example, I remember a meeting in which I was discussing a Flash "movie," which is the generic term used by developers for any Flash piece. A misunderstanding, later cleared up, occurred because the client wanted images fading into each other, and in her vocabulary that constituted a slideshow of still images--certainly not a "movie." No one terminology is any more correct here, but the anecdote illustrates some of the confusing vocabulary difference that can happen when discussing Flash. It’s ok to have a few tasteful images rotating, but a movie? The client thought I meant YouTube boxes or garish animations crowding the home page.
Most people don’t realize just how much Flash they see when they surf the web. That's because a lot of it is uninterruptive and very tastefully done, seamlessly and elegantly integrating with the other content on the page. It’s unfortunate that the Flash pieces most likely to be noticed as such are the garish banner ads and blinking animations used by online sellers. If that’s what one associates with the word "Flash," it’s no wonder some would think twice about including it on their sites.
Traditionally, there have been two main criticisms leveled at Flash as a medium. In the earliest days of the web, audience reach was sometimes brought up. This point is now irrelevant (Almost all browsers either ship with the Flash plugin, or provide an automatic install the first time it’s needed). The other common criticism is still true today: unlike most web technologies, Flash is a proprietary format. How much that matters to you is a personal question. Regardless, it’s never been so much the medium that raised contorversy, but rather its uses or misuses.
Starting on the most solid ground, I think most would agree Flash is definetly to be considered when graphic animation is needed on a web page. Cartoons, or charts that evolve through time for example, simply cannot be done as well with other technologies. Certainly most things that used to be done with applets, Director, animated gifs, or server-side libraries such as Imagemagick, are now matter-of-factly done in Flash. Part of of what makes Flash so versatile is that 1. its player sidesteps many browser differences, 2. it runs on ActionScript, a flexible programming language, and 3. it can read/write to databases over XML via an application server.
Flash is also well accepted as a way to universally embed video and audio. Placing your a/v content within a Flash movie bypasses the end user's default applications (QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Mplayer, Xine, etc). Because all users see the same content using the same Flash plugins, a much more consistent experience can be assured. This is the route many major sites have taken, including Myspace and YouTube.
Next are a number of situations in which either Flash or a good JavaScript library could provide similar functionality. This includes dragging and dropping objects on a web page, tabs, sliding panels, fade in/fade outs, rollovers, slideshows, popups, and the like. One big advantage to the JavaScript approach is that the animated content can still be easily indexed by search engines.
Some choose to build entire sites in Flash. This approach has its uses, especially in media-rich applications. However, it does present some tradeoffs. HTML loads faster, and its content can be found through search engines.
Lastly, some uses of Flash are so ugly, interruptive, and gratuitous, that they should be called out as such. One of them is the now nearly extinct “Skip Intro” movie, an animated sequence taking up the entire screen and interrupting the user before he or she can access a site (Most marketers would question giving visitors this extra opportunity to turn back—before even seeing a call to action). Another are the garish animations that appear as banner ads on many sites, relying on clashing colors and blink rates to attract attention. These are without a doubt the pieces that give Flash a bad name in the minds of some.
The potential uses of Flash are near limitless, and it’s up to the designer to use the technology with reason. Flash is sometimes the best tool for the job, and at other times it should be stashed away until needed again. Rather than partisan wholesale adoption or rejection, we should carefully evaluate its use for each potential application.