Now I’ll freely admit that as a Web Standards based developer I’m meant to just hate flash. I don’t though. In talented hands it is an incredible tool for exploring human computer interaction and also delivery of rich content.

However it is so badly abused on the web and mixed in with other poorly thought through design decisions that it’s easier just to issue a blanket noise of derision. But remove flash and you lose YouTube, Vimeo, The Daily Show, Hulu (but then if you’re not American you lose that anyway) and the BBC iPlayer (same for non-UK).

Until some point in the future where we have a universally supported web video format, Flash is about as good as we can get.

I’m completely ignoring the horrible use of noisy distracting Flash Ads, or the terrible memory hogging implementation of the Mac OS X plugin.

Splash Screens

My first major beef with Flash sites, there invariably stop you getting to the content. You either get a loding message with a lovely count to 100% or worse, a splash page. A page that only exists to advertise how cool the flash engineer is or to impress the boss of the manger who’s project the website is. These pages have no value to the user.

Animating and soundtracking your ass off to show your mastery of vector animation or provide ‘cool’ to a brand that has none, is not good for the actual users on your site. Why are you advertising at people who have already followed a link or typed your site into a browser. It’s just annoying.

It’s also interesting to note that the presence of the ‘skip link’, acknowledging that most people will want to skip the superfluous content. The most comedy use of this is on the splash page for the Singapore Press Holdings in that it’s in the flash movie itself.

Navigation

You can build all sorts of navigation using CSS, and most importantly Google can use these links to navigate your site. In my experience it seems that the navigation flash is only used to provide animated effects, to no benefit to the user and actively discouraging Google from crawling your site.

The other issue is the lack of support on mobile devices. The iPhone in particular has no flash support, as a conscious decision to save battery life, which means that your site is navigated via Flash it’s next to useless.

Funky Stuff

Now Flash is a great tool for games, ‘toys’ and also animation and video, but realistically these should be elements on your page. Flash also allows a little more experimentation in user interface, which can produce engaging and surprising sites, but we;re still talking slowness, loading bars and hidden information.

Inaccessible

I should note at this stage that I’m a massive fan of sites such as Vimeo and Blip.tv which allow me to download the original video files, so I can use them on unconnected or even on my iPod, YouTube even went as far as re-encoding all their video for transmission through it’s own app on the iPhone.

Whilst the technology behind Flash can be built in an accessible manner for disabled or blind users (including Google’s robot!) most is not. It seems that much Flash is built to make the designer’s life easy when constructing the site, “I want the menu in this tiny font”, rather than trying to bear in mind the purpose of the site, to inform users. That is probably my biggest problem with the technology; it’s used appallingly.

If there is a way your functionality can be delivered in open technologies to all users in a HTML/CSS/JavaScript way, why wouldn’t you?