[thelist] [Fwd: Flash vs. HTML]

[Simon Willison]

Liam DelaHunty wrote:

>It's probably fairly simple to take a Opensource/GPL Content Management
>System to handle the backend and HTML side, and you would "just" need to do
>the flash integration.
>
If you want to "share" content between a Flash and a static HTML site it
might be worth considering using XML. Flash 5 and above can load in XML
files from the web and "do stuff" to them via the DOM - if your content
comes out of a database all you need to do is have a server side script
somewhere that generates an XML file of the content for each page, then
load that content in to Flash when the user requests that page via the
Flash interface. The Flash player has relatively poor performance when
processing HTML though so you'll need to keep the XML documents short -
but I don't see that being a problem with the kind of site you describe
as marketing / design agency sites tend to keep text "short and punchy"
whenever possible.

Personally I'd recommend keeping an HTML opnly version, because
miserable sods like myself will hit the "HTML version of this site" as
fast as possible when they realise they could be in for a Flash only
site (with all the usability issues that introduces). 97% of the web may
have Flash installed, but that doesn't mean they like browsing sites
with it ;)