Faust - Flash Augmenting Standards
By way of a co-worker’s del.icio.us feed, I had the pleasure of reading this article this morning:
Places that Flash doesn’t belong
For me, this is no new message, but still one that I think many people need to hear more often. If you have anything to do with building websites and possibly involving Flash, please give it 5 minutes of your time.
Then from that article I followed this link:
Faust - Flash Augmenting Standards
Here within the walls of Underscore, this is just the sort of “perfect world” solution that we’ve been chatting about for years! It takes the html + css + javascript line of progressive enhancement one step further, slapping flash on top. There’s still more I’d like to know about, such as how to deep link, or how flash follows a link and stays within flash, but it’s still a really exciting find.
If you consider these two articles together, it leaves me with this thought:
For those times when a client demands a Flash-based site that still needs the performance, accessibility and SEO of an HTML/CSS site (thereby ignoring the rules laid out in the first article), Flash should be considered an “add-on” and not an “instead of”. This means more work to accomplish and therefore more cost to the client.
Upon further reflection, this approach has another benefit: the site can be built in “phases”:
- The HTML/CSS version can be developed and tweaked first, giving the client a chance to see the design take life and offer early feedback;
- The site can go live pre-Flash, getting a jump on SEO, analytics, and more;
- The Flash version can be developed last, and since all content and design style has already been approved, development should be fast and efficient.