Ding Dong! The wicked witch is dead!

Please excuse me for dancing on Flash’s grave. Flash is a technology that has been used for the last 5 or 10 years to help create multi-media websites. For most of that time it was the only show in town. If you wanted a lot of animation, you didn’t have any choice but to use flash. Additionally there was a crop of poorly trained “web designers” that only knew how to build websites using flash technology,  regardless if the website called for it.  This lead to a whole lot of really bad websites being developed.

The problem is that Flash really isn’t a very good technology.  It can be expensive to build with.  It’s more work to maintain/update than tradition web development methods.  Flash files can be quite large which can slow content delivery.  Often Flash websites are constructed in such a way as to make websites virtually invisible to search engines.  Additionally Flash is owned by Adobe who has been having a little war with Apple recently.  That means that Flash elements will not display on iphones or ipads.  Apple claims that Flash technology uses computer memory poorly and often causes the user’s browser to crash.  With all that in mind, how can you blame me for being happy about Flash going away?

The good news is that a different technology (Javascript) has been developing into a really great tool for multi-media web presentations and the stage is now set for Javascripts use to surpass Flash.  Javascript has none of the negative attributes mentioned above about Flash.  Really, at this point with very few execptions the only good use left for Flash is web video and even that should be going away soon as new web technologies will be adopted in the next few years.

So if your web developer says that your site needs to use Flash, there is a small chance that they are right….but there is a large chance that they are wrong.  Please give me a ring and I’d be happy to discuss it with you.