When will Flash become a trend?

If you’re a keen reader of the Web Design Bureau, you might have understood that I don’t like Flash. Its not an aversion to Flash in itself nor am I preparing to burn a cross down with Flash written in Comics Sans on it. It is just that I don’t like Flash the way certain designers use it without thinking about accessibility, usability or even website performance in its broader sense.

I want to stress that I left Flash at my University days. I keep a distant eye on the technology but did not want to become an expert in it as other more interesting technologies like CSS 2 and DOM scripting were taking the Web to a new level. If there is an expert on the plane, please speak up to clear any inconsistencies in these words.

Adobe Flash in itself is a great technology and tool. You can build highly interactive applications, wonderful animations (just check out 2advanced), and tight websites but it still bears major drawbacks in terms of SEO and performance. One of the stepping stones I saw Flash engineers put was the possibility of mixing server-side scripting with Flash back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Flash wasn’t locked anymore and people didn’t have to open sources and recompile a whole site or animation when a change had to be done. But that looks like it was the last thing they tried to do to really improve Flash.

The one thing that certainly annoys me is the fact that the whole team of Flash gurus over at Adobe did not find a way to make the technology more usable, more accessible, hence more search engine friendly. Versions keep coming out but none of this is present until the day Google announced that it had found a way of reading the vectorial content of Flash to index it. The technology is still budding for this type of indexation but it is giving some serious results. But how come Adobe itself is not involved in the research ? This really beats me . Its just like having a baby and waiting for someone else to change the diapers.

We are now in a world that is led by trends and buzz. Just imagine, a smart guy had the superb idea of building an Ajax app on Crazy Egg (click on any “sign up” button) and everybody is running around to have the same thing on their websites. If Flash could go beyond this huge indexation and accessibility obstacle it could get back into the race and, who knows, become once again the hype it used to be when search engines were not the rulers of the Web World. The problem with Flash is that it is going the same way as Javascript, too powerful for some and not enough for others.

Just like Ajax or podcasting, I think that Flash can have its “real” days of glory but the trend is still waiting. One day, for sure, Flash will be the new hype but for the time being it is better used with less presence and helped by standardised and CSSed pages by its side. We’re still waiting to see when Flash will become a trend.

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