The benefits of flash-animated websites, and the problems
The benefits of flash-animated websites, and the problems
Adobe’s Flash is a website design standard. As Adobe consolidates the leading position Flash enjoys by designing more and more improvements and added features into the platform, website designers around the world have responded with greater acceptance of the Flash standard. But the Flash web design platform is not without its downsides too. Flash is criticized, for example, of producing unnecessarily bulky output that bogs itself down. Let us look at some of the strong points and some of the criticisms associated with Flash, and see how fair they are. The Internet connects computers of every imaginable platform: different operating systems, ancient to modern, different Internet browsers, and different capacities. Flash is commended for being compatible across all platforms, and browsers. There is no need to worry about whether there is any kind of code that will stumble on Firefox if the website it was originally designed for Internet Explorer. A website designed with Flash in mind solidly displays the exact same way on every platform that it appears on; this is a major recommendation for Flash. The Action Scripts on Flash are its most admired feature. Website designers use Action Scripts to design interactive websites with games, music, and fun added features. It would be no exaggeration to say that Flash makes the Internet interactive. Flash animation is designed to be quite compact and not to take up much download bandwidth. If a proper streaming movie were to take the place of a flash animation, it would take forever to load. But some people feel that is compact as Flash animation tries to be, it is still far too large for slower Internet connections. Flash animation does lighten the load that websites would have to carry if it weren’t for the special programming tricks employed; but interactive websites created with Flash, are still far more bulky than the regular text-based websites. Website owners complain about how they can lose visitors to even minor delays in website loading. But there is a way to handle this; website designers need to not go overboard with animation and interactivity. If these features are kept to a minimum and used only when they will actually contribute to the usability of a website, everything should go better. The content contained in a flash presentation is not actually text; Google’s web crawlers cannot actually read the content presented in an animated form. Website owners find this to be a huge drawback; if the useful content on a Flash animation cannot be seen by search engines, how will it help push their website to the top of user searches? A standard web browser cannot actually receive and decode Flash content. Any web browser needs the Flash add-on plug-in in order to be able to play Flash content. People are not generally kindly disposed to having to download programs and do additional work just to see a website, and might find such websites off-putting. But these are really minor niggles with what has turned out to be a major Internet innovation. The Internet is infinitely more enjoyable and presentable today than it was before, for all the improvements brought on by Adobe Flash.