Flash and accessibility

using user agent string to serve content in plain xhtml to google

[buttoxicated]

Hello,

I've recently been working on a site that's going to be completely in flash (although a non-flash version will be available). Flash is perfect for what we want to do with it, but the downside is obviously the accessibility and the fact that search engines can't crawl flash movies. I've read a few threads concerning this, most posts confirmed that search engines don't index flash files.

However, i came across an article [sitepoint.com] that seems to have a good solution for at least a large part of this problem: keeping the actual content and presentation completely seperated with the use of a database, and using php to analyze the sent user agent identifier to see whether a visitor is a known search engine bot or a regular visitor. If it's a search engine bot or a browser that doesn't support flash, the content is placed in semantically marked up xhtml. If not, it's loaded into a .swf file with loadvariables/loadVars.

It's basically cloaking, but because the actual content is the same on both versions and therefore not deceiving the user, it's not against the policies of search engines as far as i'm aware.

By using the flashvars parameter in the flash embedding code to send a variable to the swf, linking directly to a subsection of the site as well as bookmarking is also supposed to work.

My questions:

1.
Does anyone have experience with this and if so, are there any downsides or things i should consider?

2.
If i use links in flash that actually reload the page with the flashvars parameter in the object/embed tags to jump to a page (to enable linking to subsections and bookmarking), will the browser use the cached version of the swf? I remember reading that putting a query string after the filename in the embed/object tags can cause the browser to reload it every time, obviously that would be a waste of bandwidth.

Thank you for your time.

[encyclo]

Surely a better alternative would be to detect whether a user has Flash installed and deliver the appropriate version accordingly? I don't have the Flash plugin installed (there is no version available for my platform), so why exclude me from your site if you are able to offer a standard HTML site instead?

[Richard_N]

found this in relation to cacheing, the answer is yes the file may be cached but you can use

loadVariables("whatever.txt?" + int(Math.random * 100000), this);

This applies to loading an external text file without cacheing it by creating a random whole number each time the file is called, but is in actionscript 1, it would need updating for AS2.

In relation to content we usually add links in a hidden div to the page with the flash file so the text files can be spidered, also possible is to call the info into the hidden div by means of an include file.