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  3. Is flash a good choice for building a site?

Is flash a good choice for building a site?

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  • D DaveAuld

    I think if you look at the dif page, HTML5 offers more than just a new video tag... http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/[^] Go look at some of the stuff done at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/[^] I still like http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/[^] (its been mentioned on here a while back when it first appeared) its built on html5

    Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn CPRepWatcher now available as Packaged Chrome Extension, visit my articles for link.

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    Tomz_KV
    wrote on last edited by
    #5

    DaveAuld wrote:

    I still like http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/\[^\] (its been mentioned on here a while back when it first appeared) its built on html5

    This is amazing. The only distration is that all popout videos have boders and title bars. I assume those can be customized.

    TOMZ_KV

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    • T Tomz_KV

      I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

      TOMZ_KV

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      Lost User
      wrote on last edited by
      #6

      HTML5 will not be replacing neither Flash nor Silverlight. If you are to develop for HTML5, remember there are competing browsers you need to cater for, this means you need to deliver content that satisfies those competing browsers and have to have fall back to Flash for those browsers that cannot handle HTML5, this means potentially 3 different versions of the SAME video. Of course, if you are developing for iPhone/iPad, then Flash is a big NO. If you HAVE to use flash, or the HTML5 video tags, keep the size as small as you can. Some flash content can look great but is hugely expensive in bandwidth, and some applications of flash can be "over the top"

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      • D DaveAuld

        I think if you look at the dif page, HTML5 offers more than just a new video tag... http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/[^] Go look at some of the stuff done at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/[^] I still like http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/[^] (its been mentioned on here a while back when it first appeared) its built on html5

        Dave Find Me On: Web|Facebook|Twitter|LinkedIn CPRepWatcher now available as Packaged Chrome Extension, visit my articles for link.

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        wolfbinary
        wrote on last edited by
        #7

        DaveAuld wrote:

        I still like http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/\[^\] (its been mentioned on here a while back when it first appeared) its built on html5

        It recommends Chrome. pass. Any website that mentions a web browser like that I'll pass or can't be viewed in any browser.

        That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_

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        • T Tomz_KV

          I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

          TOMZ_KV

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          Rama Krishna Vavilala
          wrote on last edited by
          #8

          Your question is too vague. The right answer to this question depends on several things: 1. What kind of interactive animations you are talking about? 2. What is the duration of the project? 3. What devices/browsers are you targeting? If your website can be developed purely using HTML and JS, then go for it. Since you have video, you need to use Flash/SilverLight to play it on certain browsers. On other browsers that support HTML5, you still can use the video HTML element. But then you will have problem with video codecs. The solution of which is to use Flash. The death of Flash is still far away. But I will try to do as much stuff using HTML and JS as possible.

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          • T Tomz_KV

            I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

            TOMZ_KV

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            Joe Simes
            wrote on last edited by
            #9

            Flash is ubiquitous and HTML5 is so new that it probably won't be viable for quite some time. Holy shit did I just write that sentence? :) Anyway even though Flash is crap most browsers support it with the plugin. I honestly wouldn't use Flash to build a whole site if I had the choice but I have done so in the past. Damn designers. I use ColdFusion (yes, yes another Adobe product) and using Flash as the front end is pretty painless.

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            • R Rhuros

              In your opinion does HTML5 mark the end of Silverlight too?

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              realJSOP
              wrote on last edited by
              #10

              No.

              .45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly
              -----
              "Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
              -----
              "The staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - J. Jystad, 2001

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              • J Joe Simes

                Flash is ubiquitous and HTML5 is so new that it probably won't be viable for quite some time. Holy shit did I just write that sentence? :) Anyway even though Flash is crap most browsers support it with the plugin. I honestly wouldn't use Flash to build a whole site if I had the choice but I have done so in the past. Damn designers. I use ColdFusion (yes, yes another Adobe product) and using Flash as the front end is pretty painless.

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                GenJerDan
                wrote on last edited by
                #11

                Flash websites are evil. HTML5 is not ready for primetime (according to the W3C folks who are "in charge" of it.) When HTML5 is done....it, too, will be evil as a website interface.

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                • G GenJerDan

                  Flash websites are evil. HTML5 is not ready for primetime (according to the W3C folks who are "in charge" of it.) When HTML5 is done....it, too, will be evil as a website interface.

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                  Joe Simes
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #12

                  I agree! I wish they would just let the medium do what it was meant to do. The web is a stateless environment but everyone wants to turn it into a desktop/client server type environment. So we have Flash and AJAX and all of the other tricks to fool people into thinking they are NOT on the web!! :wtf: Then again I'd probably be flipping burgers right now ... or maybe I'd still be developing educational software which was way cooler than the crap I do now!! ;)

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                  • J Joe Simes

                    I agree! I wish they would just let the medium do what it was meant to do. The web is a stateless environment but everyone wants to turn it into a desktop/client server type environment. So we have Flash and AJAX and all of the other tricks to fool people into thinking they are NOT on the web!! :wtf: Then again I'd probably be flipping burgers right now ... or maybe I'd still be developing educational software which was way cooler than the crap I do now!! ;)

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                    GenJerDan
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #13

                    If a site won't run in Mosaic, it's not worth bothering with. :wtf: Yeah, well, I wish that were the case. I miss the old web, where you could find things easily and the pron was all free.

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                    • T Tomz_KV

                      I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

                      TOMZ_KV

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                      Steve McLenithan
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #14

                      The <canvas> tag along with javascript is what can potentially replace flash. The video tag is just for playing video that the browser has a built in codec for (and yeah lots of differences in support there).

                      // Steve McLenithan

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                      • T Tomz_KV

                        I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

                        TOMZ_KV

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                        Andy Brummer
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #15

                        HTML5.0 will not be an option for a general purpose website for a long time. People are testing out all the current implementations right now. Personally I wouldn't ever build an entire site in flash, just use it for the video player. Flash has a lot of downsides as far as linking, accessibility, and just general usability and downloading. Working with javascript and html is a lot nicer now. I've been playing around with HTML 5.0 and the canvas tag if you want to check out the link in my signature, but it works best in chrome and IE9.0 and so so in firefox.

                        Curvature of the Mind

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                        • W wolfbinary

                          DaveAuld wrote:

                          I still like http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/\[^\] (its been mentioned on here a while back when it first appeared) its built on html5

                          It recommends Chrome. pass. Any website that mentions a web browser like that I'll pass or can't be viewed in any browser.

                          That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_

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                          A Offline
                          Andy Brummer
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #16

                          The whole point of that site is to show what chrome can do. The chrome development team helped put it together. :laugh:

                          Curvature of the Mind

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                          • T Tomz_KV

                            I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

                            TOMZ_KV

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                            Steve Mayfield
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #17

                            It might not be true any more, but when the company I work for redid their website several years ago totally in Flash (using an outside firm), no one could find it using search engines since they did not index Flash. I had to redo the entire thing using a combination of HTML & JavaScript :sigh:

                            Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am

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                            • A Andy Brummer

                              HTML5.0 will not be an option for a general purpose website for a long time. People are testing out all the current implementations right now. Personally I wouldn't ever build an entire site in flash, just use it for the video player. Flash has a lot of downsides as far as linking, accessibility, and just general usability and downloading. Working with javascript and html is a lot nicer now. I've been playing around with HTML 5.0 and the canvas tag if you want to check out the link in my signature, but it works best in chrome and IE9.0 and so so in firefox.

                              Curvature of the Mind

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                              Nelviticus
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #18

                              No idea why someone's voted you a 1 without leaving a comment. If you want hardly anyone to be able to view your site properly for a year or two, build it in HTML with your videos using the new HTML 5 stuff. If you want just about everyone to be able to view it as intended, build it in HTML and use flash for your videos. If you want to please everyone and are willing to do a bit more work, build it in HTML with your videos using the new HTML 5 stuff but with a fallback to flash videos for browsers that don't support HTML 5. If you want everyone to hate you, build the whole thing in flash.

                              Regards Nelviticus

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                              • T Tomz_KV

                                I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

                                TOMZ_KV

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                                Julian Nicholls
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #19

                                If you want the site visible on iPhone or iPad, then Flash is right out because it isn't and won't be supported on either platform.

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                                • J Julian Nicholls

                                  If you want the site visible on iPhone or iPad, then Flash is right out because it isn't and won't be supported on either platform.

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                                  Not Active
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #20

                                  You say not being usable from an iPhone or iPad like its a bad thing :-D


                                  I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt

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                                  • T Tomz_KV

                                    I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

                                    TOMZ_KV

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                                    N Offline
                                    Not Active
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #21

                                    Like many others here I don't think HTML5 will kill off Flash, Adobe has too much invested in it to let that happen. However, using Flash to build an entire site is a disaster. Flash should be used were appropriate, showing videos in your case, and html were appropriate, like showing content.


                                    I know the language. I've read a book. - _Madmatt

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                                    • S Steve Mayfield

                                      It might not be true any more, but when the company I work for redid their website several years ago totally in Flash (using an outside firm), no one could find it using search engines since they did not index Flash. I had to redo the entire thing using a combination of HTML & JavaScript :sigh:

                                      Steve _________________ I C(++) therefore I am

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                                      mathomp3
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #22

                                      Bingo, this is the biggest issue with flash / silverlight. Search engines just ignore the content presented in the flash / silverlight objects. Really annoying when trying to SEO. Right now the best option is to build html, and use object tags to run your various flash animations, and videos. Since actionscript ties into php / asp.net really well you can pass parameters call methods, and just about anything you want to do to the back end server, or just use the actionscript itself to do simple to medium tasks. Not to kick the bucket but you might want to look into silverlight if your doing a video intensive site, and your webserver supports IIS7+. Smooth streaming with Silverlight videos, really helps improve end user experience. Also silverlights built in privacy options are much much stronger than flash's as far as preventing copying of material. The main dislike I have with html5 is it's 100% insecure, you put it there the whole world knows about it. Think about this, all html5 video tags will quickly be indexed by google for their "video" search, and the whole world will know about every video posted on the web. Eh not a big deal right? well till a company training video ends up going viral cause of something stupid and costing the company tons of money in bandwidth charges, where as the video wouldn't been found by anyone outside of the company's clients viewable via a log in only option. Now you can code javascript to check for this or that log in status, and you can security setup your servers to only allow role based / logged in users to pull the video, but you still have to have a back end server to check against, server side coding, and such. So either you going to spend hours and hours coding security work arounds into your html5, or your going to be faced with Google causing your server to be spammable. Heck think about a simple script that runs google queries, finds the videos, and then opens and runs them all day long. Wouldn't take much time before things got slow on internet. I know cause we had a site in html5, public facing and someone sent out spam to all of his friends on facebook, to view this video. We usually had about 10 hits a month on the video. Next month we had 8,000 hits. Was a bandwidth nightmare for us to deal with. But to original question now my html5 security issue rant is getting long. If you build pure flash site forget any solid indexing with search engines, you can get some but not much. If you build half html and half flash, things will be pretty and you still get inde

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                                      • N Nelviticus

                                        No idea why someone's voted you a 1 without leaving a comment. If you want hardly anyone to be able to view your site properly for a year or two, build it in HTML with your videos using the new HTML 5 stuff. If you want just about everyone to be able to view it as intended, build it in HTML and use flash for your videos. If you want to please everyone and are willing to do a bit more work, build it in HTML with your videos using the new HTML 5 stuff but with a fallback to flash videos for browsers that don't support HTML 5. If you want everyone to hate you, build the whole thing in flash.

                                        Regards Nelviticus

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                                        Andy Brummer
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #23

                                        Awesome summary :-D

                                        Curvature of the Mind

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                                        • T Tomz_KV

                                          I have been involved in a project in which a decision has to be made for if flash should be used primarily for the site construction since vidoes are a big part of it. There are a lot of noises on the internet talking about the incoming HTML 5 that could make the flash obsolete. Looking at the specification, it just provides a new Video tag. How could that replace the interactive flash?

                                          TOMZ_KV

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                                          Joe Caffeine
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #24

                                          We have a site written in flash. The user experience with the site isn't terrible, however on the maintenance side, an abomination would be a polite way to describe it. As an extra special bonus, adobe stopped supporting flash slides and forms in CS5 which the whole site was written in.

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