My supervisor sent this to me at work the other day. It really is an amazing promotional piece. You may need to watch the video more than once to get the full effect, but it’s definitely worth watching again. I am truly amazed at how the developers were able to put this together, but I am incredibly impressed.

I assume that it’s all done with Flash, but I really am not 100% certain. What do you think?

Link

I’m sure this problem has always been around, but I hadn’t noticed it nearly as much for the last few years. So many people seem to be using Flash on their sites again, relying on it, and javascript, to render much of their design.

The problem, of course, is that a user without javascript or without Flash, doesn’t get to see much of what everyone else sees.

So, my question is why everyone seems to be using so much Flash again, recently? Why are so many home pages being built almost completely with Flash, only to completely fall apart when javascript of Flash is disabled? Why use Flash at all when 99% of the things being done with Flash (aside from things like YouTube videos, etc.) could be done with javascript and AJAX nowadays, and could be built to degrade gracefully for those without javascript?

An interesting discussion on this subject was started over at CollegeWebGuy.com. Since then, I’ve come across even more examples, though I don’t really feel right in sharing them.

It just bothers me, as someone who railed against Flash for so long only to see the days of pointless Flash splash pages finally go by the wayside. Now, to see Flash seemingly making a comeback in such a big way (at least, among higher education Web sites) really upsets me. To me, it actually seems almost lazy.

Why bother putting in the effort to develop sound DOM javascript and AJAX that degrades when you can put something together in Flash in a few minutes?

Enough of my tirade. What are your thoughts? Am I just super-sensitive to this, or are you noticing a comeback in Flash usage, as well? Does it bother you to see that, or are you okay with it? If Flash is necessary for certain applications, what are some ways you can make it accessible to disabled users?

I visited the main Web site for the Novell companies the other day, and was fairly impressed by the design of the home page. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the menu is hidden until you mouseover (poor choice for usability), but I was impressed by the overall design.

The site makes very good use of Flash, and seems to have optimized the Flash items extremely well. You won’t hear me toot the horn for Flash usage very often, but Novell’s Web site impressed me very much. When you have a chance, you should pop on over and check it out.

I was especially impressed by the home page of the main site and by the SuSE Linux pages. I am honestly shocked at just how quickly the pages load, even with the large Flash objects on each one.