[thelist] Flash Required

Erik Mattheis gozz at gozz.com
Thu Mar 8 14:05:03 CST 2007


Info on player penetration:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.
html

You note there's not a technical person on staff. More than likely, the
decision to use Flash for the bulletin board box was to enable someone to
update it by editing a text file.

Is there anything unusable about the soccer site? The new window without
navigation is a bummer ... would have been better as a small pop-up. Other
than that, the site seems to accomplish getting the info to the user just
fine.

-----Original Message-----


From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Bill Moseley
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 12:35 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: [thelist] Flash Required

Is Flash something that should be considered universal at this point?
Do new PCs and Macs come with Flash installed or is it still a
user-download?  I'm asking about a general Internet web site, not
something for an intranet.

This is somewhat of a pre-coffee-induced rant, but...

I'm on the 100% validation, progressive enhancement, accessibility,
separation of concerns, etc., bandwagon.  I'm not sure about you, but
in my daily life it's hard not to notice websites that don't follow
those ideals.  Especially when the sites were produced for
organizations I'm familiar with and I know don't have the technical
staff in-house to know current web "best practices."

Today it was my kid's soccer club's brand new website:

    http://www.rockridgesoccer.org/

I like the layout fine, but does that design really require that all text is
an image or a flash object (i.e. "Bulletin Board")?

And I wonder how a competent designer can implement a site with so
many validation errors (although they are not what I'd consider
serious errors for the most part).  Is validation just not as
important as I consider it?

Another site for an organization I'm involved with was just released
with tables nested ten deep and 175 validation errors and very simple drop
down menus using flash.  But it looks (mostly) ok in IE so the organization
considers it just fine.

Are these consciousness decisions by designers after weighing all the
options or just designers trapped in the 90s?

Whew.  Ok, off to Peet's for some caffeine.


-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org

-- 

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