RE: To Flash Or Not To Flash...

<Joe>
>Personally I think flash pages like the one you sent are intrusive to
>the user and (at least for me) makes them want to close the page
>immediately.  It just looks like a giant popup ad or something.  Also
>flash is not very portable--if you have a flash page you ALWAYS need to
>code a regular html page.  Why bother with flash at all then?
>Some people love the "flash" of flash, but personally I think it gets in
>the way of an easy web experience (plugins to download for a new user
>etc).  Flash can be used really well for multimedia websites (movies,
>musical groups) but for clean pages that have a lot of text information
>I feel flash is not a great choice.

Everything I'm seeing about Flash online (granted, much of it probably
biased) is saying that most people already have the necessary plugin to
view flash on web sites now, and that it comes with operating system
installs, and browser installs. My instincts say something similar to what
you mention above, to create a regular HTML page along with a Flash page,
but then the same instincts say that if a page has to be designed a bunch
of different ways, the design isn't worth putting out. I guess I've always
seen the goal as being one of creating a design that works flexibly, rather
than trying create several sites for each project. In that last regard,
Flash is nice because it's vector based and can resize without totally
ruining a design. *as long as* it's reliable enough that people will be
able to see it in the first place. :)

~Nathan Lyle

E-mail: natelyle(at)chartermi.net
Web: http://www.nathanlyle.com
Phone: (906)485-4806

"A good style should show no sign of effort. What is written should seem a
happy accident." - Somerset Maugham

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