I wanna blog about this because I always use Flash and building websites.
Usability, accessibility and SEO of a website are becoming a great concern these days while Flash/Flex technology is becoming a big big part of the web. Flash contents are always said to be bad for usability, accessibility and SEO, e.g. not search engine friendly, can’t be easily read by other programs that even making a lot of browser functions dead, large file size… But wait, are all of these still be true NOW?
Here are some misunderstanding or not-updated thoughts on Flash content (especially Flash-only website):
Flash contents cannot be crawled and indexed by search engines
Wrong! Google has already announced that they can now index Flash
contents (including those dynamic text fields!).
Ref: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html
Flash-only websites make browser’s back button not usable
The back buttons (also history and bookmark) are still alive on
Flash-only websites as the website use SWFAddress - using a technique
called deep-linking (also can be used in AJAX).
Ref: SWFAddress official website: http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
Flash contents are having large file size
The large file size is mostly cause by embedding images or other media files, not the swf itself. If you use many images in your html site, it still needs plenty of time to load. Actually, comparing to JavaScript, the file size of the scripting part may be even smaller and load/run faster when we use AS3, since they are all complied.