[thelist] Flash + forms

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Fri Nov 29 11:48:22 CST 2002


> From: "Aral Balkan" <aral at aralbalkan.com>
>
> I don't want to turn this into a Flash vs. HTML thread since they are
[...]
oh, come on, that's what we do here...

> 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.)

except you're still missing one key point -- if the user doesn't have
Flash, and cannot install it, then what?  is your page going to pass
WAI or 508 guidelines?  no, it won't...

as a reference to the stats, Macromedia has published its numbers
(http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/survey/whitepaper/page11.htm
l#appendixI), but i'm still wary of the methodology...

independent of that, if you walk into a project assuming that Flash
is the best solution based on those numbers, you've already failed on
the usability front... you need to test the audience *first*, not
just assume they'll conform to Macromedia's stats... otherwise Flash
is your hammer, and every project is a nail, and that's just bad...

> 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.

alternative browsers include Lynx, text-to-speech readers, search
engine spiders, etc... browsers that by their very nature won't be
able to run Flash, and whose users likely wouldn't benefit from Flash
anyway...

it doesn't solve browser incompatibility, either... instead, it
introduces Flash version compatibility issues... if you rely on the
user having Flash 5 installed in order to utilize accessibility
features, then you now have to struggle with ensuring they have the
proper version of Flash...

> 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.

see above...

of course, since i rarely see that on Flash sites, i can only
conclude it's either too difficult or time consuming... at least
tabindices in HTML are implied by the order of the elements in the
code...

> 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.

your average user has no idea how to zoom... independent of that,
yes, you could resize text, but only if the developer codes for it...
the HTML page at least can be resized by the browser without having
to wait for a developer to clue in...

don't get me wrong, i use Flash regularly in projects, but only when
appropriate for the task at hand...

there's a good discussion of much of this in the comments section of
this article:
   http://evolt.org/links_javascript

--
Read the evolt.org case study
Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself
http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904151035/evoltorg02-20
ISBN: 1904151035





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