Re: Vexille

Eric Schwartz wrote:
SpaceGirl <nothespacegirlspam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I agree, but things move on. Nobody ever imagine we'd be able to watch
video online either.

You keep bringing this up, as if it's relevant. Look, nobody cares,
much, if you have video on your site. And if you need flash to
display that video, fine. I'd prefer something a little more
flexible-- you know that Flash plugins *still* aren't available for
64-bit Windows, right? But okay, fine, display your videos with

It's coming soon.

flash! Have at it! But don't make me have to use flash just to
navigate to your videos-- that's what people are bitching about.

It is relevant because technology is converging, as usual. Because people are demanding better content, and better/different ways to explore that content.

Look at YouTube-- sure it uses Flash for displaying videos, but every
single other thing about the site is pure HTML/CSS. Maybe some AJAX,
but it's very unobtrusive if so. Look at, in fact, every single other
video hosting/sharing site on the web. Notice how they almost all use
Flash for nothing but the video?

Yes, good use of technology. Take a look at www.thefwa.com - another good use of technology, using Flash to create a fairly unique UI. You pick whatever is right for your market, or whatever you think can help your market expand into new areas. You use technology to provide a better, more friendly experience for your users. Flash is just one piece of that puzzle.

And FYI, Tim Berners-Lee *did*, in fact, imagine you'd be able to
watch videos online. The whole point of HTML was that it was designed

Okay didn't know that.

to make it easy to link to, and later embed, any and all kinds of
content, from audio to video, to, well, anything, really. I was doing
so back in the early days of NCSA Mosaic on an X terminal running off
a DEC something-or-other. And why could I do that? Because the sites
used standards-based video formats. If you use standards, then your
customers can use your content in ways you'll never imagine. If you
restrict them, they can only use your content in the way you want them
to, and that's a lot less fun and interesting. It's not a read-only
Web anymore (if it ever was, but that's a rant for another time).

That's just not the way the web work. Standards are written by techies who do not understand people. Pretty much end of story, sadly. HTML is a *terrible* standard, so broken it's almost impossible to follow. It's also VERY limited.

So we have a standard written by a bunch of techies who don't know much about people, which are broken, which aren't really applied the same in all browsers, which offer extremely limited ways of describing UIs.

The world changes. The corporations have their teeth into the WWW
these days, and slowly it's being chopped up into ring-fenced
islands. This is NOT a good thing; but on the other hand it can
offer a more focused, interesting experience for a narrower
market. I'm not advocating this for all sites, but for some it can
work wonders.

The problem is, you're narrowing your market beyond what it could be.

Or expanding it to new horizons. If you spoon feed the same stuff to people over and over they never ask for more. Do something new and interesting and you can open their minds.

Every customer like me that you turn away will tell ten or twenty of
our friends to avoid your site because it's full of annoying Flash
wasteage, and so on. If that's the kind of publicity you want, or can
tolerate, rock on, have fun with that.

"oh don't visit that site because it uses flash" is the height of short-sighed arrogance. It's also a real disservice to your friends; you should let them decide for themselves.

That's because you're thinking of the web like a brochure. Give up

Which it CAN be. There you go again trying to label things; the web can be ANYTHING you want to it be. For some people, they want a brochure. For other people they want nothing more than an interactive video. For other people it's a shopping mall. And others a place to play games.

the need to render everything perfectly and just make things degrade
gracefully, and you'll be set up to address markets that didn't even
exist when you designed your site in the first place.

In some markets if your competitor has a flashier (without a capital
F) site, they will get the business. So your clients demand you out
do that competitors site. It escalates. You as a design house have
to pay your staff and client start demanding all kinds of crazy
things like streaming video... on shopping sites!!! :(

Part of your responsibility as a professional is to advise your
clients when they're being stupid.

Not always that easy :)

USERS. Not designers, not administrators, (I love having standards
for corporate apps, even corporate web apps...) not site maintainers,
not developers. USERS. Ya know what? As far as users are concerned,
WE COME FIRST.
Yes / No. In the real world Clients come first, that curious breed of
User that pays for the product you are creating. In a perfect world
it'd all be about the users (it's very much how we TRY to work here),
but at some level what the client wants (demands/pays for) is what the
client gets.

Sometimes, if your client wants you to do something that's against
your best professional judgement, you have to be willing to let them
go. There are good clients, and bad ones, and if you waste all your
time and energy satisfying the bad ones, you won't have the time and
energy to work with the ones that Get It.

Yeah, true. But that almost never happens. It's a cut-throat business and you don't let clients go unless you really have to. Especially in the music business.

Well, that's also your choice. But don't be surprised if when having
been refused service by default, your not-a-customer decides to
blacklist your site, and badmouth it to everyone in earshot. And this
is the internet. Bitching is popular, easy, and (when not done with
flash) widely cross-platform. :-)
This would be a first. And really petty from a users point of view. It
doesn't help at all - it doesn't encourage new sites.

Sure it does. It encourages new sites that work the way we want them
to. Or are you saying we should support Flash crap-laden sites,

Flash is not "crap". Just another part of the toolset.

because that's all that's out there? No chance. I'll support a site
that behaves nicely, and doesn't shit all over my Internet experience.
If I go somewhere that has not HTML navigation, and every time I click
on something it goes "Whooooosh!", I'm not bound or obligated in any
way to say nice things about it. If I think it sucks, I'm going to
say that.

Bells and whistles for the sake of bells and whistles on an information site are... pointless.

Yes. Less easy to spoof, plus we generate everything at the server so
we're validating every request.

and then:

Nothing is perfect! There are plenty of nasty holes in all web
browsers that effect ALL web sites.

So it's less buggy, except it's not, and anyway, there's bugs all
over, so why try to generate sites prone to fewer bugs? Right.

Serving Flash via a web page is less likely to run a risk than AJAX (browser bugs). But as Flash is usually run in a browser, it's always at risk at some level. Yes Flash has bugs, so do browsers, so do networking protocols and operating systems. Pick whatever you want. The Flash VM is fairly secure, but you have to be smart with how you use it just like any other tech.

Blah anyway; you've made yourself clear. You're not at all interested in anything new. Kind of pointless discussing anything with someone so horribly stubborn. At least I look at all technologies, and keep my eyes open. You'd be broke and hungry if you were a commercial designer I'm afraid.

--

x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

http://www.northleithmill.com

-.-

Kammy has a new home: http://www.bitesizedjapan.com
.

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