I don’t think that anybody reading this blog will disagree on this. However please realize that this works both ways.

As an example, recently we designed a small Flash ‘high impact’ campaign or micro-site for the promotion of a new product for one of our clients. The site primarily consisted of integrated (not in the regular box) video, audio, animations and interactive elements. Before the site was produced somebody decided that the site had to be created using web standards and should only sparingly use Flash (instead of the proposed 100% Flash), for reasons of search engine optimization and accessibility.

When we viewed the final website it primarily consisted of images (the design used no regular system font) and incredible poor HTML (e.g. no alt tags were used, no correct doctype, inaccessible JavaScript navigation), so that it negated all the arguments why web standards had to be used in the first place.

PLUS that our originally designed user experience was completely ruined. Hardly any interactivity, no nice transitions, no seemless integration of audio, video and animations, no high impact.

Nice detail is that they could have had BOTH the designed user experience AND accessible and search engine friendly content, if they would have used a library like UFO or SWFObject, that DO use regular markup for these purposes, in combination with a good practice called Progressive Enhancement.

The point is that there are as many bad web standards developers out there as bad flash developers.

The only thing you can do about bad quality labour in general is try to raise the general norm of what the quality of a website should be, by teaching both clients and developers about the pros and cons of the different toolsets and, even more important, how to do create things the right way, using the best practices available at that moment. I personally feel that the general norm has been raised in the past few years, however a lot of work still needs to be done in this area.

On: “Even so, Flash is the best we’ve got for interactive A/V presentations, passive A/V playback, and high-frame-rate animation – no more, no less.”

One thing to consider is that in the next few years audio-visual content will boom on the web, and so will the use of Flash or any plug-in or program that will offer this content. To me the Web’s true power lies in the fact that it can offer a seemless and endless combination of different types of content, different types of publishing methods and a range of levels to interact with this content. What the web looks like in the next five years will all be determined on how we can combine the different technologies into a practical solution that fits all needs. In my opinion both Flash and web standards fit in this picture.

On: “While the alternative may not be sexy in the strictest sense, publishing a separate site for each individual combination of platform and context is ugly as hell.”

I guess that beauty is in the eye of the beholder ;-) Personally I think that a progressively enhanced website can be one of the most beautiful things on earth. The main reason for this is that with only a bit of extra effort, you can create complete user experiences, or visible and accessible websites for a lot of different target audiences: e.g. mobile browsers, text browsers, search engines, CSS enabled browsers without the Flash plug-in, browsers with good JavaScript support and the Flash plug-in.

Using Progressive Enhancement you do have to do extra effort, however you don’t create separate websites: technically you only build one website, but build it with different ‘layers’, e.g. CSS could be one enhancement layer to add presentation to your marked up content. You just offer content in a way that the browser technology support of a visitor can handle. Again, for content that would otherwise be invisible or opaque to search engines its is a bliss.

On: “5. I am wrong to assert that Flash can be published via the use of markup alone, without also accepting the risk that the user experience of a proportion of site visitors will be unacceptably poor.”

I would like to hear what the WaSP’s official standpoint is about the best way to embed Flash movies, especially there in the past year I have been going through a few hoops in trying to make UFO the most standards compliant Flash embed library available.

A few highlights, as available from the UFO page:
- UFO follows JavaScript best practices and is completely unobtrusive.
- UFO is as standards compliant as it can be; it uses the valid object element over the proprietary and invalid embed element, it prefers W3C DOM methods over proprietary methods like innerHTML, but both as long as a fully functioning feature set allows it to:
a. UFO uses W3C DOM methods to insert the object element for all Gecko based browsers (e.g. Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape) and all other browsers that use both the Netscape plug-in API (e.g. Opera and Safari) and an XML MIME type.
b. UFO uses innerHTML to insert the object element for Internet Explorer.
c. In all other cases (e.g. Safari, Opera using MIME type text/html, especially to ensure that older versions work correctly using all parameters) UFO uses innerHTML to insert the proprietary embed element. Please note that in this last case your pages will not contain valid (X)HTML code, but will pass the W3C validation tests because UFO generates the Flash object’s (X)HTML code with JavaScript.
- UFO supports MIME type application/xhtml+xml.

In short, UFO uses different code branches to deliver an optimal Flash embed to browsers as far as their DOM support allows it. It is as good as it gets.

Do you know a site called youtube? a site which, in my opinion, had so much success in ‘sharing’ videos, because it uses flash, which is almost anywhere and would work in almost all platforms, so it’s tthe easiest way to deliver video?

My point is…you’re not dealing with machines…you’re dealing with people…the internet is not about web pages, or web standards, or servers, or pages, or code, or plugins. It’s about people…and as you might think you’re educated and you know what’s good and what’s bad, people, the general public, the real owners of the internet, don’t always know what’s best for them….if it weren’t like that, reality tv wouldn’t exist, Bush wouldn’t be president, we wouldn’t need to worry about cigarrettes causing cancer because nobody with enough intelligence would think of smoking, etc…..the thing is, you cannot just tell people what’s best for them, and expect that people will follow blindly. You cannot expect that the people adapt to internet. You have to make the internet adapt to people, and, though, web standards have helped us in a lot of ways, they also have limited us in a lot of ways, just because ‘that’s not the right way to do things’. It’s true, web standards bring some order, but they are not the only way, and they are not the right way, because saying that something is the one and only way to do things is just wrong. You want to become the architects of the perfect internet, but again, if you put people in the middle, you won’t have anything perfect….so instead of trying to limit the internet to the ‘way it should be’, why don’t you try to just let it evolve…so far so good, infact the irony again is that the too most successful sites of today’s net are taking a dump on web standards, and people aren’t really complaining about them, are they?

Eleven years of hindsight teaches me that this business is far too often about whacked-out timelines and cool whizzy things, instead of consistently doing Good Things (like building sites that aren’t constrained to particular environments by design).

We can consider ourselves lucky that quite often the cool whizzy things also turn out to be good, at least in some respects.

At the same time, I don’t see how either of the implementations discussed in this thread will be always and beyond a doubt inadequate (markup with regard to universally positive UX, publishing scripts with regard to standards compliance) – not as long as work continues.

Edited to add:

If anything, the causes of the issues under discussion – the Eolas case, the W3C’s obstinacy, Microsoft’s longtime refusal to demonstrate that it gives a damn about Internet Explorer – bring this point home. If plug-in support hadn’t been hacked together out of expediency in the first place (and instead been specified and implemented with the same foresight given to other parts of HTML), I’d bet that we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

1. SWFObject reduces the hassles involved in providing a postive user experience to site visitors who are using Flash content.
2. SWFObject accomplishes its objectives by using scripting implementations that live outside the DOM Recommendation, thereby failing standards compliance tests.
3. I have a strong hostility toward Flash, and will go to rather extreme lengths in order to avoid using it.
4. Aforementioned hostility notwithstanding, there is general agreement that Flash is far from useless.
5. I am wrong to assert that Flash can be published via the use of markup alone, without also accepting the risk that the user experience of a proportion of site visitors will be unacceptably poor.
6. The preceding point is true largely because browsers have horribly broken plug-in implementations, seemingly without exception.

Fair ’nuff?

This doesn’t sound like a good idea. And advocating techniques that can be bad for users just because it’s the only ‘true’ ‘standards compliant’ way to do it isn’t a good idea either.

As for SWFObject, it’s pretty sweet as code goes – but it runs directly to document.write(),

No it doesn’t. It uses innerHTML, and only because using the DOM to write object tags is nearly impossible to do properly cross browser. Once browsers support it, I’ll gladly update the script.

the shops that care about the extensibility of their content will avoid the hacks, and the ones that only care about Getting It Launched Already will continue using whatever tools will get the job done.

This should have read: “the shops that care about the extensibility of their content over the usability of their site will avoid the hacks, and the ones that only care more about Getting It Launched Already the user experience will continue using whatever tools will get the job done.”

While your argument might make sense about some things, in the world of the Flash Plugin, there isn’t really much choice.

What offends me (and most folks with an opinion, I suspect) is that Flash developers too often put across the position that they are entitled to use their favorite tool any time they want, for any purpose they feel like achieving.

So you’re saying because there’s a few developers out there who don’t make good usability decisions, then every use of Flash is bad? Come on.

Holding onto this position in cases where standards-compliant implementations do just as well or better for achieving those purposes is what leads me to words of one syllable in reply.

What about the cases where they don’t? Nobody is arguing about when to use Flash or not, simply the best way to deliver it to your users.

I reckon most developers don’t care about platform independence a jot, but those folks aren’t the focus of my present concern – my focus is on the people who feel like their work deserves the applause of the standards-aware developer community, even though nothing could be further from the truth.

Nobody is looking for applause here, the reason for my post was to correct your original post and inform people of the risks of using your proposed solutions.

Finally, I’m waiting for someone to offer a decent rebuttal to the close of the post. Any takers?

You mean the last sentance of your post? I’ve already partially corrected you in my reposnse above. SWFObject wasn’t created simply to speed up my workflow (although that was a very nice side-effect). It was created because the user experience of viewing Flash content was broken. Things like plugin detection (you seem to brush this aside, but I think it’s because you don’t understand the implications of *not* doing it – would you rather a user just sees a big area with broken content? Maybe some random shapes flopping around instead of your awesome animation? If you think that’s a good user experience I think your job as a web developer will be short lived), handling alternate content for people without the plugin, search engine optimization, and of course the new Eolas issues.

So you see, this isn’t about some temporary band-aid. Internet Explorer 7 will be released “soon-ish”, and with it will come another couple of (few more?) years of broken browsing experiences. They aren’t changing the way it handles plugins, and it will include the Eolas ‘click to activate’.