Is a Flash site really a "website"?

[Purple Martin]

I was reading a magazine that published a list of their top ten favourite site designs. I looked at all the sites, and every one was a Flash site. Not a single HTML/CSS site in there! Some of them performed the sort of functions that we'd normally expect of a website, and others were pretty but meaningless. But none of them conformed to my (limited?) idea of what a website is.

So - is a Flash site really a proper website? Is it simply a Flash application that's available online? Am I just being an HTML/CSS snob by thinking that Flash sites aren't proper websites?

[vkaryl]

"Proper website" would presumably be one which displays itself to most people who access the web with a browser of one sort or the other. Whether said website is built in CSS, html, or flash seems to me to be irrelevant.

Not that I like flash.... I have zero use for, interest in, or patience with it. But I don't think one can state that a flash-operated site isn't a "proper website".

[bill]

Would you consider a Java applet to be a website if it mimiced the function of an HTML site? I tend not to think of these as websites, but applications.

[Stratus42]

I think a Flash site can be a website. What does website actually mean? To me, 'going to a website' means typeing in a URL in my browser and seeing information and/or pictures/graphics or just plain stuff - usually on some kind of topic. So.. if I go to a design agency site, I expect to see info about their agency etc.. if I go to a personal site, I expect to see info about their dog fluffy, pictures from their troll collection, and links to their favourite dog and troll lovers sites.

so.. if you can do that with flash.. then.. it becomes a website in my mind. I think it's not necessarily about semantics here as it is about perception.

I have flash on my personal website in small amounts - the way it's used makes them more like tile-adds - but I also have a site that is just 1 60K flash file.

flash is just a presentation tool.. just like html and css are programming tool sets. Programming an applet in java for use on the web in my view is also using just another presentational tool.. (albiet one that I can't see from my company website, that takes too long to load, and is usually not worth the wait.) ..

[DrDoc]

web·site or Web site
n. A set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization.

An image by itself can never be counted as a Web page. Neither can a Flash file by itself be counted as a Web page. However, content such as images, flash, sound, etc. can be displayed as part of a Web page, regardless of whether such non-textual content is joined by textual content or not. Several of those non-textual pages hyperlinked together would thus constitute a Web site.

Then again, that's "the Web according to DrDoc"...

[twist]

CSS/HTML are code that a browser can parse in order to format information in a way that makes it more pleasant/easier for a human to read.

A flash file is code that the flash plugin parses in order to format information in a way that makes it more pleasant/easier for a human to read.

I had a flash website once. It was a gallery of photos created in bryce. It consisted of about 50 flash files. They passed variables between themselves. Had session id's and the whole business. I didn't have any corny gimmicks or constantly moving animations.

The reason I choose flash was because I could set the flash file width="100%" height="100% so that no matter what size a persons browser was they could view the images in full-screen.

Another reason I choose flash was because of the ability to control how files loaded. For example, the .swf with the thumbnails also contained the full-size photos. I set it up to load the thumbnails first and then load the full-size images after. So while a person is looking through the thumbnails the full-size images were loading in the background.

I thought flash worked great in this situation. The visitor never saw any annoying scroll bars. No matter what size their browser window the images always filled them up without ever going over. So, im my opinion, flash can be a website.

[TheDoctor]

Surely, stripped down to its essentials (if you'll pardon the image), the World-Wide Web consists of hyperlinked documents connected via the internet. Tim Berners-Lee's great intellectual breakthrough was to see how these two ideas could be woven together.

IMHO, therefore, a flash page is part of the WWW if it connects to the rest of the web via hyperlinks. (or is this too simple?)

BTW, twist: doesn't your method mean that people see distorted pages if they don't have their browser window height and width set to the right proportions?

[ergophobe]

IMHO, therefore, a flash page is part of the WWW if it connects to the rest of the web via hyperlinks. (or is this too simple?)

Strongly agree.

Internet: the hardware and protocols that link everything together
Web: the stuff that is linked by the internet.

Both are probably here in some form or another for as long as we have advanced technological society. HTML, XHTML, SGML, English, French and Chinese are not except, someday, as interesting artifacts for scholars of dead languages.

Doesn't matter if it's

- HTML
- XHTML
- text without markup
- a single jpeg (I know of Japanese sites that do most pages this way to sidestep character encoding issues)
- Flash
- Word XP 2009
- EBNML (ergophobe's brand new markup language)
- neural signals that you receive straight into your head.

By the way, I've been hooked into that last technology for quite some time, even though my doctor says there are pills to fix it.

One last thing - don't get the historians going on this!
(Both TheDoctor and I are professional historians, if I'm not mistaken).

One last last thing - what the web is and what a web site is has nothing to do with what a "browser" can interpret. We have no idea what sorts of user agents will be browsing the web in 50 years.

[twist]

twist: doesn't your method mean that people see distorted pages if they don't have their browser window height and width set to the right proportions?

I know were not supposed to post links but I don't really know how else to show you how this works. So if you go to h**p://www.bobthebuilder.org and change the size of your browser window you'll get an idea. BTW, I have no association with bob the builder, I just have a kid.

P.S. My current site is all CSS/HTML, no flash.