[thelist] Using Flash on a website

Joel D Canfield joel at bizba6.com
Tue Mar 22 10:27:21 CDT 2011


On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:12 AM, Nan Harbison <nan at nanharbison.com> wrote:

> For a long time, I have tried to steer clients away from having all or a
> lot
> of flash on their websites. I redid a site that was ALL in Flash, so no
> content was visible to search engines (I think).
>

I'm not a Flasher, but I'm under the impression that Flash, done correctly,
is visible to search engines.

Now the iPhone and Droid come along, and neither displays Flash, so if a
> website says something important on a webpage, you are just a SOL if you
> need that content. Perhaps you are a restaurant and your clients are
> looking
> for your address to plug into their GPS.
>

I'm still trying to get my head around the iPhone not displaying Flash.
Droid doesn't? I was pretty sure it did, but my phone barely displays
numbers, let alone dancing ham(p)sters . . .


> Am I missing something, or is this correct? Will iPhone and Droid
> eventually
> be able to display Flash files? Has anyone else been mulling over this
> issue?


This is a temporary issue, just like all the folks searching for the perfect
compression algorithm to send video over phone lines. It became irrelevant
when cheap bandwidth became ubiquitous.

Before long, we'll have vector graphics and video, being created in a manner
native to computers instead of being overlaid using proprietary and
inelegant stopgaps. Mind you, "before long" probably means 10 years, which
is nearly the current age of the web as we know it, but it's still a
temporary problem. I've decided that concerning myself with it would be like
finding a better way to display realistic black and white video in 1962.


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