to my undestanding the web’s prime purpose is to provide users with quick access to information. Secondary to that you have what i call animated brochure sites that use flash to promote a company/service.
Now with CSS being a big part of the new era of compliency if you want your site’s information to be available to everyone including those with disabilities then you will need to have to make your site standards compliant, so its not only a geeky thing to have. Also remember that css is basically the method of ‘styling’ your information, the information is most important. If you take css away you still have that information, if you take flash away then your left with nothing.
That information should be accessible in all medias, future technologies like mobiles, current pda’s and any other fancy new toy that can access the internet. I agree flash is going to be awesome on things like mobile phones but its not practical, If you want the information with the minimal of fuss flash can’t provide that for you, yet.
In the end it’s not about one should be used over the other, its really a purpose driven decision to use either flash or css or both.
You can’t have seen much of the web then Sure, simplebits may not be to your taste, but you can see that the guy that wrote it is at least partly competent at design…
i wouldnt call simplebits ugly - but it doesnt excite me in the least design-wise…some people seem to confuse the fact that a site validates properly to mean its brilliant design…
Anyway, the internet is a means of presenting information (as Nokrev said) and I really don’t want to see long, usually annoying animations just to get to a different part of a site. And there’s loading too - CSS loads and renders in parts while Flash has to preload everything, and on a large site, that can be very annoying.
As… Um… Someone else said, aswell, CSS is much easier to develop for when you’re using databases, or any server-side script in general. With Flash, ohhh no, you have to work out how to do it, then you have to make sure it’s all presented correctly and in the right order, or it’ll get overridden by another peice of information you want to render, etc.
I prefer CSS, myself. Flash for headers and other cool things, but not for websites, unless it’s done properly.
I’ve been trying to go back to the days of sending information by pigeons. I tell my clients pigeons are cheaper and never crash, this will solve the PC/Mac and Flash/CSS feud, if we all just stop using the web and bought a pigeon, things would be simpler.
Any developer worth his salt knows the right tool for the right job, there is no debate as far as Im concerned, css is great, flash is great even .net has its place lol… end of.
But then MS would try to domesticate pigeons and sell those with MS logos on them. Then Steve Jobs would come thru with steroid induced pigeons which fly faster and dont get eaten by cats. Then of course the open source folks would release pigeons into the wild with no guarantees for people to use.
So in the end it will be the same thing, only with pigeons
different tools for different jobs. exactly. you really dont want to dig a hole with a baseball bat. just as you dont want to make a news site with flash.
I don’t think Flash is “attention grabbing” at all. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash, I just happen to think that it’s overused, and rarely used intellegently.
Kirupa’s Front page, and NewGround’s layout, for instance, are very good examples of how Flash should be used. Making a site that is basically a background with a Flash movie embeded in it, IMO, is usually in bad taste. There are exceptions.
My goal, once I have some time to work on it, is to come up with a site that is informative, and looks great, using a careful blend of HTML, PHP, CSS, Flash, and JavaScript to give the visitor a wonderful experience, but still be 100% readable, and understandable if you were to disable everything but the straight HTML - such as using AdBlocker to block all images, SWFs, etc, and using Firefox to disable all CSS formatting. To me, that would be the perfect site design.
simplebits is a perfect example of the current trend in webdesign, that whole web 2.0 crap, its nice don’t get me wrong, I like that odeo/basecamp style look, but as stated it wont last, remember tech style, grunge, heavy duty photoshop layouts, I say roll on the next bandwagon so I can jump right on it with the rest of you, lol
Here’s another thing that I just thought about:
If you have content inside of a Flash movie, unless you have a copy of all the text in your movie somewhere in your HTML - most likely hidden somewhere - Search Engines won’t be able to get at the content in your Movie, which means that it might be harder for people to get to your site if they are searching for relevant topics.
Also, most browsers have options and features that can act on the text of a page in specific ways - using Alt-F to search the page, or changing font sizes if the text is too big/small, or even in some cases having the computer read the page out-loud. Also, with Firefox’s Extensions, people have (or should have) more freedom with the pages they pull up. I know there’s an extension out there that lets you right-click a word to pull up a definition of it in a new tab, or translate whole pages of text.
As neat as having text-boxes in Flash full of text, and awesome animating scroll-buttons will make your page look, I think it’s a horrible trade-off to the functionality that normal text that the browser (and other programs) can interpret. Just another of my $0.02
Sure, simplebits may not be to your taste, but you can see that the guy that wrote it is at least partly competent at design…
