Flash - A Tool of Web Design

Erstwhile, Macromedia Flash is now known an Adobe Flash. This Adobe product helps in programming for creating and subsequently delivering media, animation, dynamic content and interactive applications through web and browser. Unlike the most of the formats and protocols on the Internet, it does not follow any standard specified by vendor-neutral agency.

In comparison to other means of production of dynamic content, animation and media, the resultant file size of Flash is smaller. Hence, they are downloaded faster. But to become visible at target browser, a proprietary plug-in is a prerequisite. Therefore, it seems to be more restrictive than the open HTML format.

The advantages of using Flash are as follows –

• It provides exact control over every part of the design.
• It allows creation of applications that abandons need of refreshing page or navigation to new webpage subsequent to an action.
• It provides embedded fonts instead of the standard fonts installed on most computers.
• It is capable of protecting content from unauthorized duplication.
• It gives scope of production of smaller files with option of faster loading in combination with HTML with an even conservative approach of using GIF and JPEG files.

The negative critiques against Flash are the followings –

• Design of Flash websites are poorer with confusing user interfaces;
• These sites never follow standards to be user friendly with respect to accessibility of disabilities;
• They seldom appear with search options as the crawlers of search engine rely heavily on text to index sites.
• The visibility of these sites is low.

The remedy of all critiques lay in offering alternate content to help search engines to find the page and can increase visibility. But using alternative content for search engines from content for human visitors may be considered as spamming search engines. The consequence is automatic ban of those sites.

Since recent past, Flash started offering scripting language called "Action Script". At Aleksys Technologies, we are experts in programming in Action Script. This is an ECMA language analogous to JavaScript. It offers features that keep font size of browser in consideration. It also supports the recommendations of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C. Action Script 2.0 being an Object-oriented language allows incorporation of CSS and XML in code. It supports class-based applications. Thus, it has overcome its drawbacks.