[thelist] Flash's capabilities [was: Please tell me why I hate Flash]

Erik Mattheis gozz at gozz.com
Mon Apr 23 10:54:11 CDT 2001


>  Flash is generally not my choice for information architecture,
>navigation, or other jakobian issues. That doesn't mean that is has no place
>on the web.

[etc.]

Well put ...

Something I've noticed from this thread is that a bunch of developers 
that don't use Flash, whether they like it or not, don't seem to be 
aware of some nifty things the last two releases can do - it's 
advanced beyond the "eye and ear candy" only state of it's early 
years. Ways to manipulate data that you can't do with any browser 
alone, and other ways of manipulating and displaying data that is a 
pain in the arse to get to work the same way in both IE and Netscape 
... now that I've firmly established myself to be a Flash zealot, I 
might as well keep preaching ... Flash can:

- format and display information from database queries (without Generator)
- send parameters to a back-end script and update screen data based 
on the result
- receive and parse, and format and send XML
- open a continuous data connection to a server on demand
- interpret keyboard and mouse input - including modifier keys
- do all the above with a scripting language based on ECMAscript

and

- display PNGs correctly

And it can do all of that stuff with an extremely small file size ... 
like  a < 2K file which would include a scrollbar that works (and 
looks if you want) exactly like a "real" scrollbar.


-- 
- Erik Mattheis

http://gozz.com/
(612) 827 3963




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