Charles Gallant

I was excited as a kid when I got Nintendo for Christmas, but something is wrong in this picture.

I work as a flash developer, and I am often approached about building sites entirely in flash. While I welcome the work, I’ve been noticing a number of advantages in alternate information formats.

I think that the questions consistently being overlooked by web designers are about accessibility. How important is it to me that the content is quickly and easily available? Do people coming to my site want to sit back and watch an animation, or are they looking for quick answers? Do I want people to find this site from a search engine (flash isn’t searchable)? Am I willing to let an unconventional interface potentially hide content from un-savvy viewers?

Flash began as an application that could execute complicated roll-over buttons. Then, it became an animation suite, proving to be the web’s best cartooning software. Years later, with the release of ActionScript 3.0 & Flex Builder, flash is stepping into the realm of RIA development along side things like AJAX & Ruby. With a consistently growing set of capabilities, and the spreading ubiquity of the flash player, it’s easy to become entranced by “what we can do in flash.” I believe, however, that because web users have come to appreciate things like clarity, organization, & speed, we should instead be asking “what we should do in flash.”

For sites that can anticipate the necessary patience & curiosity (such as artist’s portfolio sites, or sites about unconventional design & interfaces), flash is a great venue to explore novel forms of interactivity. Also, if the “bells and whistles” of a site don’t get in the way of the information (if accessibility is indeed a concern), flash can be successful as well. However because flash isn’t searchable, and can’t be easily aggregated via technologies such as RSS, using it as something other than a glitzy web trick is just bad design.