2 August 06
Despite Web 2.0’s promise of Rich Internet Applications, we are seeing an ever decreasing trend for Flash-only sites. Luckily, this is a good thing for all users. Here are my four reasons why I feel Flash-only sites will die out.
No wow factor any more – when Flash first came on the scene, it was impressive. There was nothing like Flash on the web, and there still isn’t any rich media like it. Ajax will never have the beautiful motion that Flash is capable of. However, Flash’s big selling point is this wow factor and unfortunately, there’s only so much you can do with it. Users get tired of gimmicky, superficial transitions – everyone’s seen a very similar thing at least ten times on ten other sites. Unless you’re a judge at a design awards show who tend to be impressed by shiny things, it’s very rare to be excited by a Flash site any more.
Users don’t like it – if your users don’t like the medium you’re building sites for, why build sites in that medium? People hate waiting. For anything. Everyone is impatient. Especially when it comes to the web. Remember the days of 56k modems and getting angry when a page took more than a minute to load? Flash brings these memories flooding back with regularly-huge file sizes and its forever-taking preloaders. Pop-up windows and adverts are also associated with Flash. I don’t think I need to comment on how annoying people find them. It’s no surprise then that Adblock, Flash and pop-up blockers have become highly popular Firefox extensions.
User interface – regular HTML sites tend to have one similar style for it’s various elements. A checkbox tends to looks like a checkbox, an input looks like an input, etc. In Flash however, these can wildly differ from side to side – a good example of this is Flash scrollbars. Hoss Gifford says:
This is a plea to you, the Flash developer community, to stop making your own fucking scrollbars. They are fiddly, non-standard and unintuitive to the average web user.
And that’s from the guy who made Spank the monkey. If Flash developers are fed up with bad UI, then I think the users must be way beyond fed up. People (especially internet novices) tend to enjoy the clunk-click of HTML. They always know exactly what it’s meant to do when they click it. Another massive downside for many a Flash site is the breaking of the back button. Although this can be fixed with workarounds (usually using iframes), it’s rare for this to happen. The back button is the second most used navigation feature after the hyperlink, so breaking it is a sin. There’s nothing worse than disorientated users who don’t know where they are because the back button didn’t go back correctly.
Accessibility – although Macromedia/Adobe are trying very hard to make Flash work with screen readers, it’s never going to work fully. This is also true with 90% of regular sites however, but Flash is different to HTML as the internal workings of Flash make it so it will never be in a structured manner. Flash doesn’t do header tags for instance, hence why Flash sites never can be optimized for search engines, and why screen readers will never know if your really big Flash text is what you mean to be your header.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not dissing Flash here. I think it is a wonderful technology, capable of marvellous things that HTML will never bring to the web and ubiquitous enough for all users to be able to experience. We are now slowly seeing a change in how a lot of internet technologies are being used, Javascript being used unobtrusively for example. Now is the time for Flash to pick up the baton and give up it’s bad reputation for being 99% evil and become a site enhancement rather a huge barrier to what people really want – content.
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Mod_rewrite is one of the more frustating things in life, it took me ages to do the work for that post. Once I start something, I have to finish it!
But this is neither here or there, Steve! Is Flash dead or not? Yes? No? Maybe so? :P
No I dont think Flash is dead at all. Not that I would mind if it were. I think the biggest threat to Flash’s existance are those flash ad banners. I’ve considered turning off flash many times as a consequence!
Well, if you’re on Firefox, you can get Adblock Plus which works a treat. It blocks 99% of ads, including text ones. Highly recommended!
Rik,
As a resource purist, I’ve always been opposed to flash and its unnecessary clunkiness. All of your points are valid—further, having your website contained within a cryptic .swf file is no bueno (think Microsoft’s TCO campaign against Linux, but valid).Anyway, You can image how excited I am to see the growth of javascript as a replacement to Flash through the popularity of the ‘web 2.0’ libraries such as jQuery, dojo, and scriptaculous. A few weeks back I demo’d a ‘Flash Replacement’ page for fun (http://www.iceburg.net/iceburg/iceburg.php)—while nothing special, I expect to see more use of js animations in the future.
It will be interesting to see what a modern web developers required toolkit will be two years from now. I’m thinking; Javscript, HTML, CSS. Not too much has changed ;)
On the other hand, flash is by no means deadFlash will be caned by after effects for all the embedded ad stuff. No doubt adobe will be trying to figure out what the hell to do with all these companies they are buying.
I disagree with ALL Four of your points.
1. If its WOW factor your after WHAT ELSE are you gonna use?
2. Users dont like it? Thats like saying everyone likes chocolate and hates vanilla..
3. Thats up to the designer, no-one HAS to make unusable interfaces, flash just give you the option to do so.
4. Just you wait.
Your 5th reason why flash is dying should be the ramifications of SEO.
Flash sites cannot be fully indexed by search engine spiders. All businesses want visitors to their websites, and with a full flash site it is difficult to bring users to the site (without a large online marketing budget for paid search and display media)
After all, what is the point in building a website if nobody can find it.
Comment by Steve Tucker on 3 August 2006, 16:25
This is a comment relevant to the last post you made on mod-rewrites Rik. My compliments on a quite elegant solution! Mod-writes are about the hottest things off the Apache line and, though initially tough to master, the rewards of what can be achieved make it every bit worth the effort of learning.