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I dislike frames because they are ugly and because search engines don't read through them. (The ugly is a personal thing..I disliked frames before I knew they didn't work well with search engines.)
I *hate* flash because
a)SE's can't read it
and most of the time
b)it is slow c)people use it to force you to watch their marketing piffle before you can actually enter the site (I don't, I leave.) d)you can't bookmark the pages e)SE's can't read it.
The flash and not being able to bookmark something, I think, is what annoys me the most even on a well designed flash site. I don't want to have to memorize how I got to something to know how to get to it later.
</sidenote>
Back to the topic of this discussion and the article, though, I will agree with Xoc and the writer of the article: flash, frames and javascript are not bad: most web designers just need to study useability.
If you think about it software has advanced such that anyone can make a web site in an afternoon by opening a cardboard box and installing the software. (Maybe not a good web site, but a site nonetheless.) Study useability? Nah. They are excited just to make the page and get the animated gifs to move. There is a sense of accomplishment by creating something that ... works.
I'll admit it. That's why I like to do it.
-G
they are the instrument of the Devil
they mess up deep linking
they mess up bookmarking
and if you slip up at all they mess up SE rankings
did I mention they were the instrument of the Devil?
they tempt designers to work with absolute sizes
they encourage lazy navigation design
and above all
they are the instrument of the Devil
I'm not wildly fond of the way Flash is used either...I have a TV...if I wanted to watch second rate animations I could watch TV in the late afternoon
the fact that most adults don't ought to tip designers off to the fact that most of us have seen badly drawn pictures moving about a screen, and we have decided we'd prefer to do something else
Because most frame haters refuse to take a second look to the beauty of it, and leave open flanks.
When properly used, they are easily bookmarked, seamless, more intuitive to users and get you top positions on many major SE.
Frames are worth the effort for those with an open mind and willing to make it.
Proper use of frames is such that a URL address always gets back to the same content on the screen.
Flash can never work with the user's model of how the web works. So the places where it should be used is where a user doesn't expect a web application. Examples being movie previews, or a virtual walkthrough of a house. It should never be on the home page.
Javascript can be turned off. The site should still work.
If in the unlikely case that you don't have version 3 of flash you dont see anything and can just go straight to the content.
The site represents the company and they wanted it to be visually impressive to the user -
anyway the whole point is that this is want the client wanted so we gave it to them. Within reason if the client wants it the client gets it. Its as simple as that really, if they are going to be shelling out cash on a web site that is going to represent their company they should have some say in what they want.
Besides what am I going to do? Say "No don't give me your money you don't really NEED a small unobtrusive flash animation"
It may suprise some of you but I actually want to make some money ;)
I have to agree with knighty that if you have a client who wants something that is not perfect but not terrible either then you should go for it, of course if your visitors are coming from search engines then theres a reasonable chance they will never see the front page at all.
(1) They eat up screen space that I can't get back. This is especially a problem with horizontal frames, since most scrolling is vertical.
(2) Browsers displaying framed sites don't behave like any other software on any platform I've used. Rectangles that don't scroll with the rest of the page are just plain weird, particularly if they don't have their own scrollbars to highlight the fact that they're separate.
The same problems apply to CSS "position: fixed;" I'll skip the other technical and usability problems, since they've been discussed endlessly elsewhere.
As for clients, I say give them what they want, no matter how bad it is. You don't have to tell anybody you designed it. They're the ones that lose customers, so it's not your problem.
That alone is an important sign. I've mentioned this before, but two years ago I "flattened" a frame site for SEO purposes. Immediately the page views for an average user session doubled.
I personally like frames when they're done well. Most software does keep a set of toolbars on screen and only the workspace scrolls. So that interface deos feel comfortable to me. But the numbers showed me that lots of people don't respond well to frames.
I still use frames occasionally. For instance, one of my North American clients shares various information with a European partner company's website. The other webmaster and I develop pages can be framed on each other's site. That way only one of us needs to maintain any particular set of information, and it can still be displayed on either site, and accompanied by either site's navigation.
Frames seem to work well for this purpose, but it's only about 2% of the total pages.
For standard internet content, Nielsen is spot on. People want access to information quickly, and they want a standardised interface with which to do this.
WHat a lot of people miss is that, increasingly, the internet is being used as a marketing tool. As a result, the content isn't always more important as the way in which the message is displayed. You want to impress 75% of people out there into buying your product? Often a bit of Flash or DHTML wizardry does the job.
This isn't to say it will supercede HTML, but I reckon it has it's own place. Often the way in which Flash is used results in a 500k download before the content is viewable. This is just bad programming. I keep my Flash down to acceptable levels - usually with a max 50k download. Pretty much less than a large jpeg.
As somebody once said, "It's not what you do it's the way that you do it."
You can't ignore the future, people. Only 3.5% of traffic to my organisations new website last month came from Netscape 4.xx browsers. Doesn't that show that we're going to be fairly safe using CSS and layers sooner than I thought?
In the way that some people refuse to migrate from a wholly antiquated Netscape 4.xx browser to the now mostly excellent IE just because it's by Microsoft, you're always going to get people who are resistant to change.
One of our priorities is therefore to influence the standards and make our lives, as well as the users lives, easier. We can't do this if we, ourselves, are not dynamic.
I think coding so that only Microsoft browsers work on a website is counterproductive in the long run. I think letting Microsoft decide the definition of HTML rather than the W3C would be a big mistake.
we are perfectly safe doing it now...the question is always one of how do non css capable browsers see the results...it's no good trying to get identical results on all browsers...it hasn't been since Air Mosaic started getting competition...and you can't get identical results on all platforms anyway
so design is inevitably going to be about flexible shapes and code that degrades gracefully...I'm shifting over to css already
millerstu: "In the way that some people refuse to migrate from a wholly antiquated Netscape 4.xx browser to the now mostly excellent IE just because it's by Microsoft, you're always going to get people who are resistant to change."
Opera
I think this is a flaw in the process a lot of designers use...if you build a site first to the standards and then afterwards tailor to specific browsers then life is a lot easier...I don't want to have to go back and rebuild a bunch of sites because suddenly Konqueror takes up a serious market share, or because everyone suddenly buys web TV...even if I got paid extra...I'd rather have the rep of building sites that work and keep working
You can with Flash ;)
[assuming defensive crouching position]
Unfortunately, at the present time there is no better browser out there. As a web professional HTML standards are of upmost importance to me in my work.
Here in the UK Netscape 4.xx seems to be being kept alive by academics who hate Microsoft and everything it stands for.
Netscape, especially after the release of the terrible Netscape 6.0 and their agreement with AOL Time Warner, as an ex-academic colleague eloquently put it "have sold their soul to the capitalist devil".
I think we should be adhering to strict standards in using our HTML and other technologies. I just don't think we should restrict either our design skills or our creativity to assure compliance with an essentially outdated browser and increasingly minority percentage of net users.
I would love there to be another browser as good as IE but infortuenlty there isn't .
Opera looks promising but still has some ground to cover and Netscape shot themselves in the foot by realeasing a buggy and inferior version 6
knighty: "You can with Flash" :)
I know one or two folks with palm pilots might want to quibble about how useful that might be
True, but I think we need to standardise delivery across the good ol' desktop before we start looking into PDAs.
It's all a bit of an accident waiting to happen, isn't it. God knows what we're going to do when web tv hits the big time. My, those pages are going to look great in those resolutions.
Still, I'm in this business for it's dynamic nature so I suppose I shouldn't complain. Much.. ;)
so I build for a mythical standards compliant browser then adapt to get the best use out of IE, Opera and Konqueror and not have too big a mess with Netscape 4
I don't see that there is any sensible alternative
as it happens I use Netscape for long downloads, Opera for general use and research, and IE for international/multilingual stuff...I don't see how that is "not accepting" IE...it's using a set of similar tools for the jobs they are best at...I don't use one browser all the time for the same reason I don't use one SE all the time, for the same reason I don't eat the same meal every day, and for the same reason I don't cook all my meals in the same pan
>there is a huge difference between accepting it as a useful tool (I do), and accepting that MS have the right to unilaterally alter web standards as and when they choose (I don't)
I agree completly
>so I build for a mythical standards compliant browser then adapt to get the best use out of IE, Opera and Konqueror and not have too big a mess with Netscape 4
>I don't see that there is any sensible alternative
Again I agree complety this is what I do too
I use getright for long downloads and IE for everything else ;)
My interest is in standardising the process across as many levels of technology as humanely possible.
To rehash what is possibly an old point, the Internet, as an organic body, is always going to favour multiple standards. Unless the whole shabang is regulated (something I would fight to the death to prevent) you're never going to get, for want of a better phrase, "standard standards".
The nature of the beast simply doesn't promote this way of thinking.
There should always be a core of standards that most browsers adhere to and which we should not necessarily stick to but at least compramise with.
Most of the opinions of the people here are decidedly against the use of Flash in any way. This is understandable as I dread having to cost out a job using a tool that I am only marginally proficient with. Flash is a pain to work with IMO.
But there are a lot of paying customers who want it. It is a great marketing tool. You cant beat it for sound and now video streaming. Flash isn't dying...it's growing.
Most of us here know the weaknesses and how to get around them. Really it isn't rocket science. A few rather simple tricks is all it takes to turn a completely Flashed out page into a spider-friendly extravaganza. Se rankings won't hinder a professional from using Flash.
So what's the real issue. Download times!
I've seen some real monstrousities out there and probably created more than a few. I've come to understand the real trick is knowing where to use Flash and where not to use it. My favorite use is sound. I can turn a 1 meg .wav file into a 12K 16 bit stereo Flash file that streams. I would say that is a big improvement.
Keeping your whole page under 30K including Flash files can be a determining factor in whether you use it or not. You might be amazed at what can be done in small file sizes with Flash. Unfortunately we don't see this very often.
Flash is a great tool when used appropiatley :)
File size can be one of the reasons for using flash, animated gifs for instance can greatly be reduced in size, you can add better interactivity to a page and impress people with it. I did my CV/Resume in Flash and it was smaller and more impressive than my word document :)
I've been using Flash since V3, and since then have seen it shift from essentially a vector animation tool to a powerful piece of software with a complete object orientated programming language behind it.
If you know Actionscript fluently you can get file sizes down to very, very small.
A year ago I created 6 modules for an online learning course at a local university in Flash. Each module came to a fairly hefty 300-500k.
After the release of Flash 5, and the boundaries of what you can achieve with actionscript were pushed back a little further, I went back and redeveloped one of the modules.
Got it down to 47k, with no loss of images, sound or animation.
That's the beauty of Flash 5. All the functionality, with tiny file sizes. If done correctly. Most of the huge files you see out there are using motion tweening, not actionscript. Therein lies the problem.
nope
a real issue is usually that so much work goes into a flash animation that a lot of dee-ziners begin to insist that every visitor has to watch the damn thing over and over again
a real issue is that Flash gets used to take control away from the user and give it to the designer, this is not the best way to use the web...it's not just interacuve TV, it is capable of being much more
good use of Flash is when it's capability for doing clever stuff very compactly and quckly is used to further the aims of the site rather than just show off...it happens...it still happens far too rarely
