Thursday, January 5th, 2006, 6:20 am
Designing With Flash
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In my own mind, there is one golden rule for design with Flash:
Non-Flash browsers should miss no information. Their users should only miss out on the flash (no capital ‘F’ here), but never any content. If proprietary formats like Flash are made a requirement for information extraction, the outlook for the Web seems grim.
It has been a long time since I last designed with Flash. This goes back to 2001, in fact. At the time, little did I know about the SEO impact, which is why I no longer bother with Flash. Originally, its use was not my choice either; it was the client’s.
As a final word of advice (or caution), menus and text should remain in pure-text form, never embedded in something that requires pattern analysis or closed-source software. The same rules apply to graphics (images) where the alt attribute must be used as a surrogate, just in case images are not (or cannot) be displayed.
