Since then we've had Apple weigh with the iPhone and a whole raft of
other suppliers bring other products to market. The vast,
overwhelming majority of handsets currently sold have some sort of
browser embedded and often a better one available for download.
Openwave, Opera, Safari, etc.
http://www.operamini.com/beta/features/- find where it mentions
Flash.
Flash is just form over function - it sells because it's pretty and
that fools many site creator's clients.
Statements like this demonstrate a clear misunderstanding of the
technology itself.
"If you're using text to try to describe something search engines
can't access - for example, Javascript, images, or Flash files -
remember that many human visitors using screen readers, mobile
browsers, browsers without plug-ins, and slow connections will not be
able to view that content either."
Search engines are machines. Bits of software. People are emotional,
generally visual creatures, unlike search engine. A search engine
understands text, based on rules. People understand colour, layout,
motion and have emotional responses to these things. I would hope that
designers build sites for people, not for search engines. A search
engine is a means to an end (indexing, accessing a market I suppose),
but once you have that precious visitor on your site that's when
everything else becomes important.
Flash is one way of presenting the sort of Rich Media that enables
these "human" sites; there's nothing evil or irrelvant about Flash -
it's just a tool. Just like HTML, or JPEG images, or AJAX or XML...
Classing Flash as some sort of "bells and whistles" toy though is
really to completely misunderstand the platform that it provides. This
is not that unexpected - Flash has been really abused over the years,
but over the last 18 months has really come into its own. Flash itself
is a web browser. It's also a virtual machine, we an extremely
powerful programming language at its core. It leverage's the kind of
functionality that can only be dreamed of with JS and traditional
HTML.
Here's the caveat though; Like any tool, you select what's best for
the job at hand. Flash is not idea for all projects. Flash generally
is not good for mobile platforms (yet) as they lack the horsepower to
run the full version of Flash. In other words it's better to do it
other ways.
Also, you have to think how people use the WWW; it's a VERY big place,
and there are a lot of differing browsers and technologies. While you
should always make your content available to the largest numbers of
people possible, focusing your projects on particular audiences is far
more effective. In specific markets, Flash has almost 100% penetration
(specifically, younger markets with money to spend), they are more
likely to have Flash enabled, a broadband connection and be impressed/
interested in rich content (video, animation, sound) - think online
magazines, games sites, sites for bands.
So... form over function? If that "form" provides a more relevant
interface to your functionality, writing it off as irrelevant is
seriously restricting the way you communicate with your audience.
You can have the most functional web site on the planet, and it can
fail because of band branding, or poor layout, or a competitor with a
nicer looking site.
It's dangerously naive to think that these things don't matter.
Now take another look at the growth of the browser-capable handset
market.
BTW.... most smartphones support Flash.
