[thelist] Flash + forms

Aral Balkan aral at aralbalkan.com
Fri Nov 29 06:02:01 CST 2002


Sorry about that aardvark (forgetting to trim.)

I don't want to turn this into a Flash vs. HTML thread since they are very
clearly technologies for very different things. HTML is a document markup
language and Flash is a rich client-side development platform for web
applications. That said, to respond to your questions:

1. If the user doesn't have Flash -- and this is an increasingly smaller
segment of the population since it now comes preinstalled on all PCs with
Win 98 and up, as well as with IE 4, 5 & 5.5 and Netscape 4.06 and 6, Aol 7,
Mac OS 8 + (inc. Mac OS X.) -- the plugin is a ~380k download and at least
one browser, IE, automatically prompts you to install it. According to
statistics from Sept. 2002, the Flash 5 player currently has 92% penetration
in the US (92.1% in Canada, 94.1% in Europe and 90.1% in Asia) and the Flash
6 player has 53% penetration in the US (56.8% in Canada, 61.3$ in Europe and
60.3% in Asia.)

2. I don't know what you mean when you ask about alternative browsers. One
of the biggest advantages of Flash is that it *is* a platform and solves the
problem of browser incompatibility. As long as you have a Flash movie and
the Flash player, the movie will run. It doesn't matter whether you're using
IE, Netscape, Opera, etc.

3. Using Flash 5 (which has >90% penetration world-wide), you can implement
keyboard short-cuts for the form (the equivalent of accesskeys), labels and
tabindices.

4. Regarding "kickup up font sizes": You can dynamically re-layout, control
the scaling of, etc. any element within a Flash movie, including fonts.
Apart from the built-in zooming capability, you can dynamically resize fonts
for a given selection, etc.

hth,
Aral
________________________________________________________________
 Aral Balkan | Bits And Pixels | http://www.BitsAndPixels.co.uk
 24 Claremont Heights, 70 Pentonville Road, N1 9PR London, UK
 t/f: +44 (0) 20 7278.1825 mob: +44 (0) 7986.124219

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of aardvark
Sent: 29 November 2002 06:16
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] Flash + forms


> From: "Aral Balkan" <aral at aralbalkan.com>
[...]
> You don't need to do all this -- just create the form in Flash. It'll
> be far more robust than an HTML form and you won't have to resort to
> all this trickery.

first, aral, let me ask that you *please* trim when replying to
anything on thelist... just trimming headers and footers alone could
have cut the size of that message...

second, while the form *may* be more robust, what happens if the user
doesn't have Flash?  what about alternative browsers?  what about if
the user doesn't have the latest version of Flash, will your form
have accesskeys, labels, tabindices, and other
usability/accessibility attributes built into HTML4?  what about
kicking up font sizes?  etc...

<snip>

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