[Gllug] Flash and Dreamweaver going to port for Linux

[Jack Bertram]

* Tethys <tet at createservices.com> [040317 09:38]:
> 
> "Chanka Perera" writes:
> 
> >good news to webmasters ....
> >
> >Macromedia is going to port there products Flash and Dreamweaver to Linux
> 
> You seem to be making the mistake of thinking that Flash is good for
> the web and for webmasters.


(flame-retardant suit, yada, yada)

Of course, writing whole web sites in Flash is a terrible idea, for
many reasons (accessibility, size, breaks design paradigms). And if
you care about your customers, you need to make sure that you don't
_need_ Flash to be able to use your site.

But Flash _is_ a good thing for the web and webmasters, because there's
no way of doing some of the things it can do in HTML.  (Sony's robot
site linked the other day is a good example, where the Flash site is
much more interesting thatn the content-equivalent HTML version). If we
want the web to continue growing and changing, then we need to look
ahead to a time when bandwidth is cheap, multimedia moving pages are
available and can be interacted with in mutliple ways, etc.  Whether
it's Flash or a different technology (even an open-source one) which
evolves to meet those needs I don't yet know.

However, making the leap from "Flash websites are bad" to "Flash is bad"
must be wrong.  We need to (constructively) criticise Flash for lacking
important features (so they get added) and webmasters who don't design
their sites to be accessible, whether in HTML or in Flash, until it
becomes a can't-live-without rather than a nice-to-have. But we 
shouldn't be Luddite about it.

Apologies if I'm reading the wrong sort of criticism behind the
statement you originally made.

jack
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