Flash Loons

[post2google@yahoo.com]

I was thinking about where to go for lunch the other day, so I went to
hardees.com to see what the menu looked like these days. What
comes up is a big note that my flash version is not new enough so I
can't use the site. What complete losers!

When are businesses going to understand that the purpose of a web
site is to communicate with customers or business parterns and NOT
so your "web master or "web engineer" can show off what they learned
down at the community college last week!

So I went to Taco Bell. A couple or years ago a similar thing happened
when I went shopping for a new backpack. The frist place on the google
list refused to work because I didn't have flash install. I went to the
next business and orders several hundred dollars in gear. Hopefully
the losers at the first place went out of business.

I am beginning to believe that FLASH is, on total, a loss for the
Internet. It breaks browsers (especially mozilla/firefox), it chews
up cpu cycles on the clients, and it can write stuff on you
computer. And more.

To do my small part, I installed FLASHBLOCKER on by browser.

End of rant.

[Jeremy]

Re: Flash Loons

post2google@yah oo.com wrote:[color=blue]
>
> When are businesses going to understand that the purpose of a web
> site is to communicate with customers or business parterns and NOT
> so your "web master or "web engineer" can show off what they learned
> down at the community college last week!
>[/color]


Close. The purpose of most web sites (not web *applications*, mind you)
is marketing. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Unfortunately for you,
John and Jane Doe are more attracted to pretty pictures and "gee-whiz"
animation than they are to usability and real information. They both
use Windows and Internet Explorer, and have Flash installed (whether
they know it or not, because they don't bother to read browser pop-up
windows before clicking buttons to make them go away).

Even more unfortunately, these are the people that companies care about
because they are the vast majority and flash-haters are a tiny minority.
The companies see you as a grumpy, Get-Off-My-Lawn type who is not
going to buy their product anyway, because you're far too busy thinking
about the Early Bird Special at Fresh Choice and boasting about your
grandchildren :-)

I personally think flash has its place. I'm not going to go out of my
way to block it, but I'm not going to go out of my way to make it work,
either. I definitely agree that it's VASTLY over-used, especially in
banner ads. Dear lord, I hate banner ads - it's a bit hypocritical that
I work for a company that produces them :-P

Jeremy

[Chaddy2222]

Re: Flash Loons


post2google@yah oo.com wrote:[color=blue]
> I was thinking about where to go for lunch the other day, so I went to
> hardees.com to see what the menu looked like these days. What
> comes up is a big note that my flash version is not new enough so I
> can't use the site. What complete losers!
>
> When are businesses going to understand that the purpose of a web
> site is to communicate with customers or business parterns and NOT
> so your "web master or "web engineer" can show off what they learned
> down at the community college last week![/color]
Haha.
Siriously, that's a dam good question.
I do not know the answer though.
Then again, I think it may have to do more with the clients then the
web designers.
[color=blue]
>
> So I went to Taco Bell. A couple or years ago a similar thing happened
> when I went shopping for a new backpack. The frist place on the google
> list refused to work because I didn't have flash install. I went to the
> next business and orders several hundred dollars in gear. Hopefully
> the losers at the first place went out of business.
>
> I am beginning to believe that FLASH is, on total, a loss for the
> Internet. It breaks browsers (especially mozilla/firefox), it chews
> up cpu cycles on the clients, and it can write stuff on you
> computer. And more.
>
> To do my small part, I installed FLASHBLOCKER on by browser.
>
> End of rant.[/color]
I tend to agree, that Flash is indead a bad tool for the web,
especially when it is badly implermented.
It has it's place, perhaps on an arts site, where you need to be
perswaided by some good visual design in order to buy a product, but
not on a food retailer site, where all you want to do is look at a
menu.
I also think that a good websites goal is to solve the customer and or
users problems.
--
Regards Chad. http://freewebdesign.cjb.cc

[Stephen Poley]

Re: Flash Loons

On 1 Jul 2006 00:48:16 -0700, "Chaddy2222 " <rockradio2000@ yahoo.com.au>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>It has it's place, perhaps on an arts site, where you need to be
>perswaided by some good visual design in order to buy a product, but
>not on a food retailer site, where all you want to do is look at a
>menu.[/color]

Flash can potentially have a use on almost any site, provided it is used
as a supplement to the basic textual information, not as a substitute
for it.

But most actual uses of it are indeed pretty irritating.

--
Stephen Poley

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: Flash Loons

On Sat, 1 Jul 2006, Stephen Poley wrote:
[color=blue]
> But most actual uses of it are indeed pretty irritating.[/color]

Yes, but advertisements are *meant* to be irritating. What other
explanation could there be for what we get to see?

And (on the other hand) the efforts on the users' behalf that go into
suppressing the display of unwanted advertising? If it wasn't so
irritating, where would be the motivation for working so hard to
suppress it?

So much for generalities. As to specifics: I've got the latest flash
installed, but protected by the flashblock extension. If and when I
decide to view the flash, I can press the flashblock button, and view
whatever it was.

Several web sites, however, somehow contrive to prevent the flashblock
button from appearing, and instead they tell me I haven't got flash
installed. The various cases that I've met so far, I reckon have been
more their loss than mine, so I haven't bothered to work out what
they're doing wrong.


Warning - I'm about to ramble off about a site that I very recently
needed to use and stuck in my memory. I'm not suggesting it's
particularly worse than many another vendor site...


Here's an interesting piece of logic. If I go to the Dell euro
support site,
http://support.euro.dell.com/support...=uk&l=en&s=gen , then
it shows me an image of some text that's telling me "This page
requires Macromedia Flash to be viewed properly". If I turn off
images, it stops claiming that, and appears to be "viewed" just fine,
modulo the occasional image lacking its mandatory alt attribute. It
even sprouts a "Skip to main content" link, suggestive of someone with
a glimmer of an idea (I have my own opinions about such links, but I
concede that my opinion is in a minority).

So what do they mean by "viewed properly" ??? There surely can be no
"proper" way to view a page that fails HTML syntax validation (a mere
112 syntax errors).

The page is even claiming:

Dell Support Web site wins international award for
excellenceExter nal link


If I open the same page with Lynx, then I get a series of error
reports about cookies with invalid cookie domains, but, after agreeing
with Lynx's proposal to reject them, I can view the site. But several
of the advertised operations produce an "unsupporte d URL scheme" for
"javascript:... " URLs. What a pity that "internatio nal award for
excellence" doesn't necessarily mean the site has to actually *work*,
in WWW terms.

Do any cookie fans understand why these cookies failed one of Lynx's
criteria, whereas Mozilla, Opera etc. seem willing to swallow them
without any kind of alert or warning?


It'll come as no surprise to this group that the awarding body's own
web page http://www.lisa.org/awards/index.html doesn't even pass HTML
validation. I had to turn its stylesheet off to be able to read it
comfortably. And it failed automated checking for 508 or W3C WAI, as
one would expect.

It claimed to be "XHTML/1.0 Transitional". Is it just me, or is that
an instant bogosity detector?

cheers

[Alan J. Flavell]

Cookies, was Re: Flash Loons

On Sat, 1 Jul 2006, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

(about
http://support.euro.dell.com/support...=uk&l=en&s=gen )
[color=blue]
> If I open the same page with Lynx, then I get a series of error
> reports about cookies with invalid cookie domains, but, after
> agreeing with Lynx's proposal to reject them, I can view the site.[/color]

Sorry, I'm drifting off-topic for this group - but I'm not sure where
the proper place is for discussing this.

The above scenario seems to be analogous to what's reported in

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253974

In the present case, AFAICS, support.euro.de ll.com were attempting to
set a cookie for domain .dell.com - that's illegal according to the
RFCs. RFC2109 4.3.2 for Set-Cookie ("shall not store", i.e a mandatory
requirement on clients):

| Examples:
| A Set-Cookie from request-host y.x.foo.com for Domain=.foo.com
| would be rejected, because H is y.x and contains a dot.

Also RFC2965 3.3.2 (SHALL NOT, i.e a mandatory requirement on clients)
for Set-Cookie2, with a similar example.

The following text in what seems to be a related Moz. bug 263931 is
more than a little worrying:

| We tried enforcing that once or twice and broke big-name sites. It
| might be their fault for violating the spec but the user blames *us*
| for having a broken browser.

Does that say that Mozilla are content to compromise their users'
privacy because "big name" web sites violate the specifications?
That's not very nice!!!

[David E. Ross]

Re: Flash Loons

post2google@yah oo.com wrote:

I was thinking about where to go for lunch the other day, so I went to
hardees.com to see what the menu looked like these days. What
comes up is a big note that my flash version is not new enough so I
can't use the site. What complete losers!
>
When are businesses going to understand that the purpose of a web
site is to communicate with customers or business parterns and NOT
so your "web master or "web engineer" can show off what they learned
down at the community college last week!
>
So I went to Taco Bell. A couple or years ago a similar thing happened
when I went shopping for a new backpack. The frist place on the google
list refused to work because I didn't have flash install. I went to the
next business and orders several hundred dollars in gear. Hopefully
the losers at the first place went out of business.
>
I am beginning to believe that FLASH is, on total, a loss for the
Internet. It breaks browsers (especially mozilla/firefox), it chews
up cpu cycles on the clients, and it can write stuff on you
computer. And more.
>
To do my small part, I installed FLASHBLOCKER on by browser.
>
End of rant.
>

See my <http://www.rossde.com/internet/Webdevelopers.h tml#flash>.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
into your E-mail? Use PGP.
See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

[Andy Dingley]

Re: Flash Loons

post2google@yah oo.com wrote:

I am beginning to believe that FLASH is, on total, a loss for the
Internet.

I think it's great - nearly as good as HTML email. How else can I have
such clear and simple annotation for "you don't need to bother reading
this bit" ?

[Alan Silver]

Re: Flash Loons

In article <1151932765.203 140.211060@m73g 2000cwd.googleg roups.com>,
"Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesm iths.com>" <dingbat@codesm iths.comwrites

>post2google@ya hoo.com wrote:
>

>I am beginning to believe that FLASH is, on total, a loss for the
>Internet.

>
>I think it's great - nearly as good as HTML email. How else can I have
>such clear and simple annotation for "you don't need to bother reading
>this bit" ?

That's about the funniest and truest thing I've read today (which tells
you something about my day!!)

--
Alan Silver
(anything added below this line is nothing to do with me)

[Alan Silver]

Re: Flash Loons

In article <Pine.LNX.4.64. 0607011410450.2 6549@ppepc87.ph .gla.ac.uk>,
Alan J. Flavell <flavell@physic s.gla.ac.ukwrit es

>So what do they mean by "viewed properly" ??? There surely can be no
>"proper" way to view a page that fails HTML syntax validation (a mere
>112 syntax errors).

Sure there's a proper way to view such a page. You click the Back button
and view it disappear!! It's a lovely feeling. You can even call out
"Bye bye loser" as it goes. Makes me feel a whole lot better sometimes.

>The page is even claiming:
>
Dell Support Web site wins international award for
excellenceExter nal link

Ah, but they don't say for what. They can easily claim excellence in
validation errors. I reckon that one page has more of them than all of
my web sites put together!!

Ta ra

--
Alan Silver
(anything added below this line is nothing to do with me)

[David Stone]

Re: Flash Loons

In article <syipg.162041$F _3.147489@newss vr29.news.prodi gy.net>,
Jeremy <jeremys@uci.ed uwrote:

post2google@yah oo.com wrote:

When are businesses going to understand that the purpose of a web
site is to communicate with customers or business parterns and NOT
so your "web master or "web engineer" can show off what they learned
down at the community college last week!

>
>
Close. The purpose of most web sites (not web *applications*, mind you)
is marketing. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Unfortunately for you,
John and Jane Doe are more attracted to pretty pictures and "gee-whiz"
animation than they are to usability and real information. They both
use Windows and Internet Explorer, and have Flash installed (whether
they know it or not, because they don't bother to read browser pop-up
windows before clicking buttons to make them go away).

Then again, there are folks who use Flash in very creative ways...

Try (assuming you have Flash installed/enabled)

http://www.cbc.ca/mapleshorts/

My favourite:

http://www.cbc.ca/mapleshorts/films/?filmid=4

A little harmless time-wasting never hurt anyone!

[Stephen]

Re: Flash Loons

On Tue, 04 Jul 2006 08:02:46 -0400, David Stone in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html wrote:

>Then again, there are folks who use Flash in very creative ways...

>Try (assuming you have Flash installed/enabled)
http://www.cbc.ca/mapleshorts/

>My favourite:
http://www.cbc.ca/mapleshorts/films/?filmid=4

Thanks for sharing ! Did you have a direct involvent with either/or ?

>A little harmless time-wasting never hurt anyone!

Exactly ! In my experience it's luddite developers whom can't stand
progress, that dislike Flash so strongly.

It's a no brainer that everyone dislikes the Flash splash pages of a
bygone era -- But, anyone whom considers themselves a Web Developer, has
to provide clients and their clients, the end users, what they want.

Increasingly this is multi-media, rich interfaces, that in most cases
can't be done with CSS/HTML. Flash is the best way in my opinion of
providing that experience. It's also the best way to provide video on
the Web as of Flash Player 8&9.

Flash is here to stay folks and will be increasingly used. To deny
otherwise is to stick your head in the sand, and refuse to believe the
inevitable.

Inviato da X-Privat.Org - Registrazione gratuita http://www.x-privat.org/join.php

[Alan Silver]

Re: Flash Loons

In article <slrneal11l.3e2 .Stephen.D.Alle n@sweetpig.dynd ns.org>, Stephen
<Stephen.D.Alle n@gmail.comwrit es

>Exactly ! In my experience it's luddite developers whom can't stand
>progress, that dislike Flash so strongly.

No, what we luddites don't like is when the usability of the site is
sacrificed in the name of flashy design. Sure the site needs to satisfy
the client's requirements for being attractive, but it also needs to be
usable. Too many Flash sites have serious usability issues, and not just
for people with disabilities.

As many have said before, the problem is not Flash per se, it's the
(ab)use of Flash in practice. When done well it can enhance a site.

--
Alan Silver
(anything added below this line is nothing to do with me)

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: Flash Loons

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Alan Silver wrote:

<Stephen.D.Alle n@gmail.comwrit es

Exactly ! In my experience it's luddite developers whom can't
stand progress, that dislike Flash so strongly.

>
No, what we luddites don't like is when the usability of the site is
sacrificed in the name of flashy design. Sure the site needs to
satisfy the client's requirements for being attractive, but it also
needs to be usable.

Usable? - that's just what a certain kind of deezyner can't stand. The
last thing that they'd want is for the user to have any kind of
control over *their* precious presentation[1]. That's one of the
reasons that flash appeals to them - it gives them the impression that
/they/ are going to be in control of the user, instead of vice
versa.[2]

As many have said before, the problem is not Flash per se, it's the
(ab)use of Flash in practice. When done well it can enhance a site.

Indeed, and that goes for pretty much any kind of media, if
appropriate to the purpose to which it's being put. But to make an
otherwise useful web site /dependent/ on those other media is a
different story. Those whose current browsing situation doesn't
facilitate viewing (for some wide sense of the term "viewing" ;) the
other media are then, at least, in a position to decide whether
they'll revisit when they're in a position to view it.

Given a choice, though, I'd prefer an open format to a proprietary
one.

HTML is still a "lingua franca" of the web; it would be foolish to
toss it aside and make one's basic navigation depend on something else
(whether it be flash, java, MS Word, PDF or whatever).

regards

[1] a few years back, one of these deezyner types posted, apparently
in all seriousness, on a German language discussion to say that any
user who interfered with the settings of their browser was in
violation of the author's artistic copyright under German law, since
the law said that authors of works of art could mandate the conditions
under which their work could be shown, and - in that poster's opinion
- the HTML and CSS *were* that mandate. I didn't see anyone else
supporting their argument, though!

[2] The truth may be that Flash is in control of both of them :-}

[Dick Gaughan]

Re: Flash Loons

In <Pine.LNX.4.64. 0607041849490.1 6425@ppepc87.ph .gla.ac.ukon
Tue, 4 Jul 2006 19:10:57 +0100, "Alan J. Flavell"
<flavell@physic s.gla.ac.ukwrot e:

>On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Alan Silver wrote:
>

><Stephen.D.All en@gmail.comwri tes

Exactly ! In my experience it's luddite developers whom can't
stand progress, that dislike Flash so strongly.

>>
>No, what we luddites don't like is when the usability of the site is
>sacrificed in the name of flashy design. Sure the site needs to
>satisfy the client's requirements for being attractive, but it also
>needs to be usable.

>
>Usable? - that's just what a certain kind of deezyner can't stand.

If a report on BBC News24's flavour-of-the-week cool-gimmick
worshipping Click programme is a sign of the times, that old
"Luddite" argument might be about to cause some serious blushing.

According to the report, it appears the latest really kewl thing
to hit "the net" is a revolutionary new discovery by several large
corporations that the way to get more business via their websites
is - wait for it -

a) to place content high on the front page
b) to cut out unnecessary graphics
c) to dump fancy navigation bollocks in favour of text links.


Laugh? I nearly bought a round. Not a dry leg in the house.

--
DG