The same problem. i couldn’ find an answer.

i want to know if Google can read and follow links that are inside of flash files in any way.

thank you, if someone pick this up.

Is there any chances of Google releasing a do and don’t or general tips needs to be followed while creating a flash based Web site?

I was under the impression that reading the text & links inside a Flash file wasn’t the biggest issue… Trying to determine context & prioritize the information found *in* the Flash file appeared to be a problem.

HTML/XHTML provides several options for modifying the “weight” of a particular chunk of text (, H tags, etc.), are Flash files still going to be at a disadvantage due to all of the extracted content being weighted evenly?

No I don’t work for Adobe in any way and never have. I have worked for a cross-platform GUI tools company before the web really took off, and I’ve built my own (quite nice) AJAX framework long before the term was coined, among other things, so I’m in a pretty good position to spot and understand this type of technology.

I certainly won’t be the last person to mention Flex to you, and I’m sure you will see the apps that people are building with it and what it can do in due time. It’s solid stuff, and fundamentally more powerful than anything that can be built on top of the lowest common denominator of HTML rendering engines, at least until native SVG support becomes the norm.

The last argument of yours I will shoot down is what you call your “original” argument. If Flash can’t handle these issues, why should you think that Flex can? This one is easy. If the win32 API can’t handle all our needs why would we need MFC? If AWT can’t do what we need, why do we need Swing? If HTML can’t handle all our needs, why do we need AJAX? Flex is library of widgets on top of Flash that make UI design easy, fast and efficient, on a consistent platform with deep and wide penetration and potentially good SEO characteristics.

Nice meeting you Adam. You made some good points. You can have the last word too; I’m outta here.

Many of the phone lines are still copper, and are not being upgraded…which pretty well eliminates DSL in those areas.
There is a lot of new home construction and development that Bell Canada refuses to prepare itself adequately for, and the first thing that goes in that situation is DSL.
Cable only works when there’s a group of people willing to use it (at least 5 or more). If not, you’ll have to pay the cable company $5000 for the initial install if you want it (that’s not an exaggerated figure either…that’s what Rogers wants to install any cable for a group of less than 5).
There are even spots in Canada where dialup doesn’t work (they’re very remote areas of northeastern Ontario, Quebec, parts of the Northwest Territories, and I think Nunavut as well) but they do exist.

II’d suggest to you that the statistical compilation provided is inaccurate at best. The Original Nick (at least he thinks he is) can shed some light on this subject as well. I’m not sure what the actual statistics are, but the speeds aren’t that high and the services aren’t that reliable. The only thing I can come up with that would increase the average is that there are spots (e.g. 151 Front Street West, Toronto…Google that address) that have an insane amount of bandwidth and, because the population here is relatively low, the average is that much easier to bring up.

But enough about the mess that is Canadian broadband.

You may never forgive Macromedia for killing HomeSite, but should that really have any impact on how you choose technologies for your clients? I don’t think they really care about your vendetta.

Oh, I fully expect they don’t care what I think. I fully expect they don’t care what you think, either. We’re each one person. We’re drops in the bucket.

And I wouldn’t use their destroying of HomeSite as the reason why I don’t find their technologies useful. I don’t find their technologies useful because…they’re useless. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it than that. If they’d help my customers, I’d use their stuff…and have.

Do I like using Flash? Hell no. I hate it. But I’ll use it.

As far as Flex is concerned, this goes back to one of my original arguments…why is it that we need an additional program to do things within Flash that cannot be included within Flash itself? And more importantly, what reason is there for faith that Macromediadobe has finally gotten anything right as far as the issues of SEO, accessibility, user-friendliness, ease of use from a developmental standpoint, and productivity are concerned? The former alone, assuming it’s not dealt with fully (and there’s reason to suspect it isn’t), suggests that Flex may not be the answer.

The other thing that’s interesting in all this is how many people are talking about Flex. No offense, dude, but you’re the only person I’ve ever seen that’s mentioned Flex by name…and how does anyone here know that you don’t work for Adobe or in some capacity with them? I’m not saying you do…but it’s certainly a possibility. Online shills aren’t exactly a new phenomenon these days.

Where are the apps that people are building with it? What does it really do? What doesn’t it do? Who’s using it for something practical? These are the questions that always go through my mind with any piece of technology, and most of the time, the technology fails…usually on the pragmatic question.

This is my whole problem with the idea of Flex…if Flash can’t handle these issues, why would I think that Flex can? And why would I spend $250 to do things that I can do with HTML for nothing?

If I had been more clear that I am talking about Flex running in the Flash VM, not Flash the graphic design program, many of your other arguments would have whithered away.

#1) with that mindset, we would all be using ftp, and nobody would ever write software that didn’t work on Windows.

#2) Firefox is taking up 160Mb on my machine right now, and I run FlashBlocker. A complex Flex app may weigh in at a hefty 1Mb before optimization. But that’s only 0.5 seconds of download time for the median American user (1.9Mb/sec speedmatters.org) And actually your beautiful country has 5x higher download speeds than the US; give your countrymen some credit! Again this is without optimization and download speeds are rising fast, and the download only happens once. Then you get all the interactivity and speed advantages of RIA, even more so than AJAX because Flex RemoteObject uses a binary format, not that it should matter that much.

#3) I’m not sure why you think the Flash VM is less installable than a browser. If you’re just talking about some very large corporate environments, I agree.

#4) Flex is very easy to pick up for anyone with a programming background, and it is very well documented.

#5) Flex again wins here. It is one of the most logical and consistent UI frameworks ever with no cross-platform concerns, unlike HTML and certainly your favorite AJAX kit. It’s true though that transitions don’t always behave the way you want the first time.

#6) of course Flex can allow for reusable code, even dynamically linked if you like.

#7 you didn’t mention SEO, the original thread of the conversation. IF Adobe really has made these improvements, and I’m not sure they have, Flex will be a serious technology for web apps.

And your overarching argument of “Why don’t we see more sites built if Flash?” is confounded with the fact that all those websites were built in the past before Flex/SEO. Oh and also, Flex actually works, and it works well. FlexBuilder can use some touch up, but I’ve found it to be generally reliable and helpful environment. If I leave it up full-time it will crash for no apparent reason about once every week or two. This is probably due to the FlexBuilder plugin of Eclipse and not the underlying Eclipse config itself. Eclipse itself has a bit of a learning curve if you’re not familiar with it. It is extremely popular though so many people have made it over the hump.

You may never forgive Macromedia for killing HomeSite, but should that really have any impact on how you choose technologies for your clients? I don’t think they really care about your vendetta.

Believe it or not, I am totally independent and this is my view, however unpopular it may be with holy warriors.

I think the web developer community may be suffering from stale and outdated views regarding SWF content. Soap-boxers such as many who have posted here are, in my opinion, at least inflexible in there thinking on how to create a positive user experience with the changing technology landscape.

I would suggest that’s partly true, although I also think this statement is somewhat clouded with the same kind of Macromedia doublespeak that leads to a lot of the backlash. There are some people out there who simply won’t accept Flash on any terms from a developmental standpoint.

Personally, and I only speak for myself, I’m not averse to new technology in and of itself. I think most of it’s explained horribly and far out of the grasp of all but the most computer-savvy people (the ones who consider Slashdot a social site, for example), but I don’t have a problem with it as long as I can see a use for it. Google Maps, for example, is quite useful and has a lot of cool stuff in it if you’re just willing to bash your head off the wall for a few hours trying to figure out what the hell they’re talking about in the API reference (by the way, Matt, there’s something else you can pass on…better examples and more layman explanations of the Google Maps API. That thing reads like Crime and Punishment in spots…you have to go back and read it 4-5 times before it makes any sense.)

The current push toward AJAX or other RIAs is validation that page-based apps are insufficient for much of what we design.

Not necessarily. It’s a validation that AJAX can provide a new level of efficiency in the retrieval of data. Personally, I’m a big believer that a lot of the future of search will be AJAX-based. We’re already starting to see some of that within big G…besides, building an AJAX-based search engine and watching people’s jaws hit the floor when the information they wanted is retrieved faster they can turn their head to say “it hasn’t showed up yet” is freakin’ hilarious sometimes. You just aren’t gonna get that within the Flash framework the way it stands.

First, you mention that SWF requires a plugin, and that Adobe’s claim for 98% adoption is overstated. This may be so, but I think you would agree that the Flash VM has higher adoption than at least the first two browsers combined and maybe more. Whatever the number is, it’s high.

Actually…I wouldn’t agree with that at all.

Flash is still verboten in a large number of corporate environments.
A large percentage of users are still on dialup and therefore would have no use for most of the Flash-based content that’s out there…particularly in my native land of Canada, where there are still very large areas of the country that cannot get a high-speed signal unless they catch lightning in a bottle and a business-class portable Internet modem or wireless PCMCIA NIC picks up a signal.
Some people simply cannot (e.g. Lynx users) or will not use Flash or other plugins…period.

I don’t know what the percentage is either, but based on my own observations, I’d say a conservative estimate is that this is about 10%.of the potential “marketshare”, leaving the figure at no more than 90%. I don’t even think it’s that high personally (I’d estimate between 75-80%), but it may be. Again, we’ve got nothing to base this on…and neither does Adobe (other than their own so-called third party study.)

If we take a look at Hitslink’s recent browser share figures, they peg the top two browsers as MSIE and Firefox. If you add the figures together, they combine to 92% of the browser market. I would suggest to you that it’s pretty close…and my own observation of the stats for the sites I deal with is that the count between the two is just under 98%. That’s more than 90%.

Second, people complain about the amount of time it takes to download a SWF. But everyone just accept the response time it takes to run their favorite page creating technology on the server and send the results over the wire, practically every time the user clicks the mouse button. If the user doesn’t have to wait every time they click the mouse button, it’s mostly because you are using AJAX or something else, which means your original page took even longer to download. But the browser download status bar doesn’t count, right?

That’s because it generally will take longer to initialize the plugin, download the SWF and play it than it will to load an HTML web page. Of course, the way a lot of people “code” web pages and server apps, including some pretty major organizations, there are major exceptions…but a clean web page (code and graphics) will almost always load more quickly than a clean SWF equivalent.

As far as the AJAX thing is concerned, this would also depend on how it’s coded. If you write your application in such a way as to use server resources as much as possible (basically, call your page, let the server generate the appropriate output as much as possible and do minimal JS-based manipulation after that) then you’ve got what you need.

And if you want to talk load time, try this in Flash 8 (not sure if they fixed this in CS3, but I highly doubt it). Build yourself a photo gallery with a series of thumbnails and full-sized images, and have the thumbnail/image info in a database (file name, width, height should suffice). Pull the thumbnail/image information from the database, then try to preload those images (or even “postload” the full-size images) and recall them without any subsequent image loads. Spend about 8 hours building the thing, coding it, trying to find out how to do what you want (keeping in mind that every example you’ll find online will be non-database-driven), bashing your head off the wall, and then finding out that it’s completely impossible to load the full-sized images into a cache. Every time you want that full-sized image, you have to reload it.

How’s that helpful to the end user? How is that an efficient use of resource? How is that in any way better than a Javascript-based equivalent which falls back on conventional HTML page-loading if the user doesn’t have it enabled?

Implicitly I suspect many people hate Flash because they’ve been forced into doing something too complex for the original artsy program.

Not sure what you mean here.

Lastly, SEO. As other have said, this was their last argument for why they should not build a site as a SWF. (Why do you think you have to make those arguments in the first place?)

I’ll grant you that. There are many other reasons why Flash is useless for most things, and SEO shouldn’t be the last reason.

Like this one, direct from Adobe themselves (click the “Why is Flex different than Flash?” FAQ):

Developers may find it difficult to use the Flash tool to create applications.

That’s a euphemism if one ever existed.

The biggest argument against Flash as an exclusive tool for full websites is actually made by Adobe themselves, without their ever having meant to. Ask yourself this…why doesn’t Adobe make their site all-Flash? Why don’t they just show off a site that uses all of their wonderful Macromediadobe products in one shot, without the need for HTML-based content? Because even Adobe’s not that stupid.

Here’s another way of looking at it: if you were to play an unofficial game of Family Feud and ask people how they get the most use out of Flash, what do you think the #1 answer would be? Or to rephrase the question somewhat, what site is the most useful site that in some way incorporates the Flash plugin?

YouTube.

And what is YouTube, when it comes right down to it? It’s a computerized idiot box. I like YouTube, but let’s face it…the site does nothing more than to turn your computer into a TV featuring your choice of short programming (clips from TV shows), commercials (people trying to advertise to you as well as people who think it’s a form of “social networking”) and home videos (people who talk on their webcams…and actual home videos). So that’s basically what Flash has been reduced to at its top end…TV.

I’m all for something that would provide a richer user experience than what we have now…as much as I don’t think it’s hard to provide a quality user experience without Flash, I don’t think any of us should be averse to that. But it would have to do six things:

1) Work on the same or a greater percentage of machines than HTML does.
2) Make minimal use of resource.
3) Be universally installable.
4) Be something that the community at large could be able to pick up quickly and use quickly to at least build basic applications as quickly and with the same quality that they could with conventional HTML.
5) Provide a logical, consistent framework within which to build things.
6) Allow for reusable code.

As of right now, Flash fails on #1) and #3). #4) is an issue simply because what few “Flash developers” there are can’t explain bugger all to anyone and tend to look down on the community at large (although to be perfectly fair, the geek community in general does this). #2) can be a problem. #5) is a problem…certain aspects of Flash (e.g. creating a motion tween) don’t always behave consistently). #6) may or may not be possible…but from what I’ve seen, the only way it is possible is to load a movie within a movie, which doesn’t really make much sense to me. It’s a moot point anyway, because as long as #1 and #3 are in place, the rest really doesn’t matter.

That’s why we see more HTML stuff than Flash…HTML simply works, whereas Flash does not. I’m with Doug on this one…Google, please buy Macromediadobe out and do the whole stake-through-the-vampire-heart bit. Macromedia should never be forgiven for destroying the greatest web editor that ever existed (Allaire HomeSite).