flash navigation trap

[someone]

does that mean it's not a good idea to use flash on my navigation menu? because search engines don't index flah? thanks.

[rocknbil]

Correct. In fact in **MY** opinion - anything you put on your pages, you need to ask yourself one question: does it still function WITHOUT it? Remove the object and see. This is what you get if someone has it disabled.

If the answer is no or "well . . sorta . . ." rethink how you're working the page.

In this case you can use a Flash navigation **IF** you provide other obvious means to get around the site. Bottom-page text links are one choice.

One possible solution is to use Flash's "Detect Plugin" publishing settings. This is intended to create a page that has the Flash if the plugin is detected, or a sitemap with a graphic and clickable imagemap if it's not. This adds quite a bit of Javascript to your page and now in addition to being Flash-dependent, it's Javascript-dependent. Even worse, the methods they use do NOT work on all browsers and all situations. It's a mess (IMO.)

Same philosophy, don't depend on anything that "may or may not work." If I'm forced into creating Flash nav elements, I hard-code the object in and provide plain-text links. At least that way, there will ALWAYS be something working.

[whoisgregg]

Bots are getting better and better at following links embedded in flash files, so someday this may no longer be an issue.

For now though, you should always have plain html links for your site navigation available both for search engines and for users with accessibility needs.