Just only yesterday I was talking about When to Use Flash? since every client or arrogant designer/company thinks Flash is the future, its the norm and its a necessity in the Internet world today.
All I can say to that is, “Bah! Humbug!”.
I came across an interesting article written by Eric Webster and he was talking about how his team now has a solution to not only limit themselves to replacing titles with Flash text.
If you’ve never heard of it before, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) had become the best solution to replace old Verdana or Tahoma looking fonts as titles with more appropriate looking fonts in accordance to the theme of a website. In other words, if the website was about kids and you’re bored of using Comic Sans MS then this was the solution for it.
Version 2.0 of sIFR was released on 27 April 2005 and you read all about the history and what’s news with it over at Mike Davidson’s website.
So in conjunction of when to use Flash, the commenters over at Eric Webster were complimenting the breakthrough yet some opened up and questioned the need of Content Injection in Flash With XHTML and sIFR.
If all Malaysian Flash designers knew this, I think the problem of already non-existant value of Flash usage would be heightened due to the excuse they could use in protection of saying that they did a website in xHTML though it’s fully Flash based.
There’ll be no end to this and no one in Malaysia will be able to grasp the actual value needed to be contribute into the website.
I personally really don’t like flash, flash intro screens being the ultimate sin.
Whenever I’m looking at proposals I turn down those with too much flash, I don’t mind the odd thing, an animated logo (not on repeat) or a little block that catches your eye, but not too much.
Personally speaking I think all that usage of Flash just doesn’t hit the point. It’s useless, and serves its purpose for only aesthetic purposes.
But as you said, if more people knew about this method to use Flash in the content (as opposed to just the header), then we’d be seeing greater design-over-content crimes perpetrated by the public, heh.
I suppose since not every designer/developer/firm here in Malaysia cares about standards, usability and accessibility at some point, we’re forever stuck in a “..do Flash-lah, sure your website chun wan.” Malaysia. *roll eyes*