[LINK] Australian Web history

[Brendan Scott]

Stilgherrian wrote:
> On 11/08/2009, at 10:55 AM, Roger Clarke wrote:

[]

> At the risk of encouraging various people to repeat their woft- 
> repeated series of heels-dug-in ideological position statements...  
> while Flash is indeed proprietary, that doesn't make it necessarily  
> evil.

It is not necessarily evil, but it is evil.  Not because it's proprietary, but because it is typically used to obscure information.  Flash is about promoting entertainment over information. 

For example - stats on wordpress use flash to display a graph.  The only value that flash appears to add is animation of the graph line from line x=0 to whatever the stats are - ie while the 2 seconds of animation may be entertaining the first couple of hundred times you see it, after that it's another 2 seconds of your life gone (multiply by number of websites using flash). 

Elsewhere flash is used in such a way that web sites are, in effect, unsearchable.  And they impose the designers idea of navigation, including forcing people through a particular path rather than jumping to the end point they're interested in.  

Coincidentally, I was just complaining about flash a day or two ago:
http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/if-you-dont-have-flashtm-we-dont-want-your-business/

and somewhat longer ago:
http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/astoundingly-stupid-harris-technology-catalogue/

... and don't start me on the bandwidth used by flash games on kids websites. 


> Whether Flash is used well etc is another whole issue, of course.

quite!