AJAX and Flash might be great for showing off what a designer or programmer can do

Are you sure you know what AJAX actually does? There’s so much more to it than showing off what a programmer can do! One major problem with web based applications is that they are stateless; AJAX brings us one step closer towards getting around this problem and making web apps as functional and efficient as desktop applications. I’m all for accessibility but the benefits of AJAX to a programmer are huge and far outweigh the possible misinterpretation of the back button. Provided it’s used sensibly and doesn’t make the user think they’ve gone anywhere, I don’t think that this would be a problem anyway. I agree with some of what you’re saying, both AJAX and Flash can be used badly at the expense of accessibility and standards but they can also be used very well and set a site apart from all the rest.

Flash is not dead, I think your view of flash is stuck in the late 90`s. When used appropriately flash can be great.

http://blog.jensfranke.com/2006/02/11/orange-project-%E2%80%93-the-technical-view/

It pains me we people like you seem hell bent on divided web developers into two camps, flash vs. css/ajax.

Why not treat us as professionals, we are able to learn more than one set of skills and decided when it is appropriate to use css/ajax and when it is appropriate to use Flash and maybe (you might find this hard to believe) when it right to use both at the same time!

Getting back to the article, I don’t think that Phil is saying that Flash and Ajax should just go away and die, but he’d rather the designer would appreciate the user experience a bit more. A ‘meet in the middle’ approach. After all, we’ve (standards folks) started using flash in SIFR . I’d like to see the ‘factions’ coming together and using the benefits of both styles of design. We can’t say that Flash/AJAX is evil because it’s down to the designer as to how s/he uses it. A little AJAX might not harm accessibility and may improve usability. It could also ruin the experience entirely. Flash could be used to convey a technical issue a lot better than text or imagery.

Think of the problem, try to use the best technology to solve the problem and then make your final product avaialable (and usable) to as many people as possible.

Take lightbox. Would you want to click the back button to hide the overlay ? No. If you press the back button you want it to go to the previous page. Using page reloads for overlays would confuse users. We in fact can restore good usability in some situations using AJAX.

I too think it’s a matter of choosing the right technology to solve the right problem. It finally boils down to the golden rule of all technology use: use it for a reason. If you don’t have a reason, just don’t use it.

I am a web standards evangelist who is also a Flash dev (yes, that’s possible) but I am also the first person to question ‘Is Flash appropriate for this project and why is it better?’. Most ‘AJAX’ apps I’ve seen aren’t even really AJAX in the first place. Just DHTML that, had it been written better, could have been contained on one page and no ‘remote scripting’ would have been needed at all.

Yes there are a ton of crappy Flash sites(omg are there a ton of unusable crappy Flash sites), but there are also a ton of crappy HTML sites too. There will always be. The close mindedness of what Flash is capable of that I’m reading here looks like it was copied form Slashdot 5 years ago. Flash is a powerful tool and it’s not going away but neither is AJAX. Why not learn both? I have.

To reitterate, I think Phil is saying that you can actually have Flash and AJAX and it can be usable and comply to standards.

Due thought and attention should be used when using these technologies though.

I like flash. In small doses. Same way that I like ajax in small doses. It may be a shock to a few, but I still read up on actionscript programming, and I still routinely read articles by Robert Penner on programming flash.

With that said: One has to recognize that while Flash can be used WELL in certain contexts (the orange project that was posted by Gareth was fantastic), it is OVERWHELMINGLY used in a poor way: as a full user interface with little/no consideration for usability. Or, as a flash intro.

It’s not like I want to further wedge the divide between flash and css/xhtml.

It’s just that I don’t want to see a new one between AJAX and xhtml. you dig?

“open a new doc and press every button use every filter. Once you get that out of your system, then we’ll start to learn how to design.”

I think thats whats still going on in flash thought i do it calming down and i think for the next couple years we will see that in the use of Ajax. just give a few years guys might seem long but in terms of the programs lifetimes its still in its infancy and we just have not finished ” pressing all the buttons”

(By the way a good example of a site that uses a bit of unobtrusive Flash is http://kiva.org)

What’s interesting is that no one at all is claiming that poorly functional web design can still be beautiful. There are beautiful, but nearly unplayable, pieces of music. There are beautiful paintings that are totally abstract and would never match your living room decor. There are plenty of beautiful but completely uncomfortable beds, chairs, and sofas. But I’ve never met anyone who’s said a website is frustrating, confusing, unstable–and lovely enough to be visited again.

In other words, I think we all agree that the goal is web design that doesn’t limit functionality, that doesn’t limit creativity, that doesn’t limit funcionality, and so on. There are different tools—AJAX, DHTML, usage of strong style sheets—that can work towards that goal. But very little is going to be absolute in an environment as fluid as web design—very little except what works for the user.

Plugins don’t care what tags invoke them… that’s up to the browser. EMBED was introduced in Netscape 2, and Microsoft later introduced OBJECT a bit later in IE3… a number of *years* after that the W3C said “don’t use EMBED” but didn’t suggest how the world’s browsers might migrate to that edict. That’s why you see functional plugin invocation not pass muster with spec validators, because the spec didn’t first validate itself to reality.

Plugins don’t care about OBJECT or EMBED… it’s the browsers which read those HTML tags.

(It took me awhile to realize that I had to open this page to full-screen size in order to see the comment field.)

-QFE…I totally agree.