Are we creating the problem?
April 11th, 2010 | posted in:flash, web ,2 comments »
In light of the recent surge in the HTML5 vs Flash debate making waves in our industry, I’ve been thinking a lot about education in our field. We often defend Flash by saying that much of the complaints — like not being able to use the back button or pointless animations that take forever to load, for example — stem from lazy developers or bad developers who just happened to pick Flash as their weapon of choice.
I think this is true. Designers and developers often choose to create a project in Flash for the wrong reasons. We tend to brush this off as if it’s not our problem. How can it really be my problem that someone else is using Flash to create a completely crappy site, right? (Feel free to substitute HTML5 for Flash in that last sentence, because that could easily happen as well.)
I want to believe that those folks are building sites like that in spite of knowing or having been taught better. That they made a conscious choice to make a site that fails on both aesthetic and functional levels on purpose. But then I find seemingly legitimate online Flash classes that are teaching lessons like “Building a Flash Restaurant Web Site” and “Building a Simple Site in Flash” or something similar. No HTML or user experience considerations are covered in these lessons. The essential theme of these lessons is that it’s okay to build a really basic site in Flash and forget about all those silly little details.
As an industry, if we’re teaching lessons like that, is it our own fault new designers and developers don’t know how to pick the right technology for the job?
Sure, not *all* classes are like that, but there are enough of them out there.
There are other things about education in our industry could use work in my opinion, but in general I think it’s pretty out of touch with how the really good work is done.
2 Comments
Brett Says:
Though lazy developers are certainly a problem, I believe a lot of blame rests on both Adobe for not optimizing the Flash Player a long time ago (instead going for MS’s “add more features!” mantra to sell copies). But I’ll also point a finger at ad networks and websites themselves for overcrowding web pages with Flash ad banners that all try to do too much. In isolation, the banner may not tax the system heavily, but when you have three on the same page things break. Adobe should have worked closer with ad networks on this, as I recommended to some of the higher-ups there. I think they felt it was better to be hands-off, but now they’re paying the price for the tarnishing of Flash’s reputation.
Frankly though, these problems will only be worse when ads are developed in HTML5. Most sites, or should I say the guys that come up with the site’s creative concepts, push Flash past the limits of most consumer machines besides the 8-core Xenon chips they’re viewing it on. Most creative types don’t care about technical realities and user experience; they only care about winning awards. HTML5 creative executions will fare no differently.
April 11th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
val Says:
Good point about the ads. While the ads give Flash a bad name too, doing them in HTML5 is not likely to make them less annoying. I wonder if people will start complaining about HTML5 ads in the near future?
Creative types should care about technical realities and user experience. But I’m sure there are plenty of them who have no idea what those are. The ones that do care probably never learned that in school, we tend to leave that out and just hope you might pick it up once you hit the real world.
April 12th, 2010 at 1:23 pm