Yahoo! Netrospective: Why Flash is Evil
Monday, January 2, 2006
OK, this is a rant pure and simple. The Yahoo! Netrospective page is getting some attention but personally, I think it's a shining example of why Flash is evil. There's absolutely no good reason for doing this in Flash at all. here's why I think Flash in this context is evil:
- I can't right click: all I get are Macromedia menus, I want properties of the object I'm clicking on.
- When I hover over a link I can't see the URL in the status bar in my browser I have no idea where it's linking to. I'm clicking blind.
- When I click I have no control over how it opens. Each link forces a new window open, I hate that. I want to right click and open new tab so I can open a bunch of those links before reading them.
- When I hover over a link I get no title tooltips, most of the red link text is uninformative.
- There are no semantics: this is why the web is not binary. As a binary file this page is a blob of semantic silence. By the look of the source code the authors are not even interested in the notion.
- It does not degrade. Unless I have all requirements I get nothing. All or nothing is such a poor offering on the web these days and frankly, unacceptable.
This old fashioned stuff has to go.
2 Comments
Finally, someone who I agree with: Flash is generally unnecessary: I've just had to talk a client out of a Flash site because he saw a competitor's "shiny" Flash site and wanted one like that. It's a courier firm, why the f*** would they need a Flash page when (valid) HTML & CSS could do a much neater job which will last a lot longer?
WQE, a well expressed, and well spelt, point of view!