Web developers, repeat after me: Flash is bad.

Flash navigation removes right-click functionality. It breaks bots and search engines. It fills up the advertiser’s arsenal with entirely new ways to obscure content and frustrate users. Sites built entirely in Flash break the basic metaphor of the Internet—the page. You can’t link or bookmark anything, and if you mistakenly hit the back-button, you’re back to square one.

And yet, there’s been some really neat stuff happening with Flash. Especially when combined with Javascript to provide unobtrusive enhancements to pages. I have here two examples… I also have a really neat idea, but I’m not talking about that until it works; I hate vapourware too.

sIFR

It’s the poster child for unobtrusive Javascript and Flash. A simple script iterates over a document and swaps out text headlines for Flash ones. Brilliant.

The downside? Right-clicking such a headline gives not a standard right-click menu, but a Flash movie menu. I’ve mostly solved this problem, but it’s far from perfect.

Nevertheless, sIFR is a prime example of Flash Done Right. A tiny movie providing a progressive enhancement. No back-button breakage, no wacky music.

playtagger

Speaking of wacky music, please meet playtagger. Drag it up to your bookmark toolbar, then check out a page full of MP3s, such as one of these. Hit the bookmarklet, and poof—a quick, flash-based, in-browser MP3 player.

It’s playtagger that’s really got me thinking about the power of bookmarklets and flash movies. Tasks that might have required browser plugins can be accomplished simply by harnessing the power of a plugin that already has over 90% of the market.

• It can be used without restarting the browser,
• It can be tried instantly, and
• It can be used on corporate computers, public terminals, and other situations where browser extensions are not a possibility.

The Bookmarklet Thing

For my readers who haven’t a clue what that word even means, here’s a one-off I wrote recently:

1. Drag this link up to the bookmark toolbar of your browser.
2. Open this passage from BibleGateway.
3. Click the thing on your toolbar.

See? It stripped out the superscript verse numbers. May seem trivial, but it would have been a pain to remove them manually from within OpenOffice.

And plenty of bookmarklets just do goofy sorts of things like that. But you can see the potential that’s there.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 7:51 pm to Internet, Web Tech.