Flash For Text - Why?

October 27, 2003 | 3 Comments

Zeldman has a new article on coding for easier redesigns over at Macromedia’s Edge magazine.

The article is displayed in Flash with a three column layout and split up into 5 pages. There is a printable version available, which I suggest you use if you want to actually read the article. (You should, it’s good.) In any case — I’m wondering why Flash was the chosen delivery method for this.

As far as I can tell Flash offers the user nothing here and if anything takes away from the user experience. I can’t select any of the text, I personally don’t like multi-column layouts for reading from a screen (the code samples were especially hard to follow) and I have to go to another page to print it out.

Since they have these articles in HTML, what is the advantage here? The home page graphic / flash promo? Couldn’t they have presented an (X)HTML based magazine with that piece separated from the main content of the page?

No it seems like this is yet another example of Flash for Flash sake. There are times I guess when that is appropriate, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Filed under: Flash

Comments

1. Ed said:

Keith, great comments. And while we are on the subject of “layout” I’d like to point out that on page 5 of the article there first paragraph begins and ends with a single curly bracket - }

No fault to Jeffrey Zeldman as I enjoy reading much of his work. But I’m fascinted with how caught up developers can be with “CSS XHTML compliant designs” and “flash becuase we can” yet they miss the boat the simple widows and orphans. And columns of text that don’t align to the top (see page 3 of the article).

The printer-friendly version worked mush better for me as well.

Posted on October 28, 2003 11:34 AM | #

2. dez said:

Ordinarily I would agree with you. Generally, I hate articles which are broken up into several pages. But my main gripe when this happens is that there is no alternative text version. In this case there was. Also because it was a short article, I found the format made it quickly readable and easy to scan but that’s just me. Finally, Zeldman seems to be fine with the chosen presentational format for his article.

Posted on October 28, 2003 05:16 PM | #

3. Keith said:

Ok, I get your point but I still think it’s a silly way to deliver this article, putting it into Flash gains nothing. Three things:

First - I do think it’s good that they have an alternate version, but you don’t know that (at least as far as I can tell) unless you first attempt the Flash version. If you don’t have Flash enabled you may get this by default. However, that doesn’t help me, who has Flash enabled, if I’d not seen that “printer friendly” button I wouldn’t know about the alternate.

Second - The primary delivery method of this article was via Flash. Why? It’s text. The majority of the folks interested in reading it would probably prefer plain text. Again, what is the reasoning behind putting it into Flash?

Third - The fact that Zeldman even mentioned the fact that they had chosen Flash should tell you something.

Posted on October 28, 2003 07:37 PM | #