flash question
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- cx3news
Does anybody have any good examples of flash sites that are very content heavy? most cool flash sites that I've found only have a couple of pages with small content. Or its a large html site with flash components.
- Shaney0
f-1 did a couple but they are both now offline, replaced by js/html websites...
case studies still online if it helps
http://www.f-i.com/work/road-run…
http://www.f-i.com/work/mtv/mtvc…
- ceiling_cat0
Love how fantasy interactive did a mtv site that lasted a week
- ceiling_cat0
Fantasy Interactive: We're all about details, we'll polish the shit out of your site
MTV: Awesome, go for it
Fantasy Interactive: Here you go, we are the best
MTV: GTFO- i'm sensing you are not an FI fanmightyj
- I make fun of everyone equallyceiling_cat
- mikotondria30
- yeah, it exists. but it's a total pain in the ass to use.kingsteven
- mikotondria30
so why did the roadrunner and the mtv site get replaced then, cause what they have now - uh, just doesn't look as good..
Full rounded, well-reasoned arguments please - and I understand the canned larval aspect of my request..- is it bad if I didn't understand the second part of your comment?ceiling_cat
- am I opening up a can of worms ?mikotondria3
- ukit0
There's no real reason to build a whole site in Flash.
Beatport for instance has some great content and is successful, but the site is an embarassment.
- mikotondria30
how else might you be able to create and play a playlist at the top whilst still navigating around the site and having it play continuously ?
- ukit0
Hmm well I guess you could either go popup for the player or if you wanted to get tricky you could run the entire site on one page (which is pretty much what Flash does anyway, right?) while dynamically writing in the content and page URL.
- mikotondria30
run the entire site in one page ? What would be the advantages or not of doing this NOT using flash - basically you are actually, as you say, emulating what flash would do, using tools not entirely designed to do the job, unlike flash, which is.
I say if you got the beatport brief, namely - allow customers to play the music they're thinking about buying without pause or hindrance whilst they also browse the catalog, then flash is the best tool for the job..
- ukit0
miko, I'm sure Flash requires plenty of additional code to get it to do what Beatport does. The deep linking functionality, for instance, isn't native to Flash.
The point is the experience could be created in either Flash or not Flash but with HTML, your content is available in a standardized format, which is a much more extensible framework for the future. HTML is much easier to manage using a CMS, more easily searchable, accessible to the disabled, viewable on a wider range of devices outside the desktop experience.
- mikotondria30
exactly right, ukit - I do agree..
So how, after all this time are we in this mess - where to achieve a simple goal such as the brief I outlined for beatport, you literally have to hack the interweb either with Flash, or mangle acres of javascript and ajax to be able to achieve it. Oh and if you go the non-flash route you can only really use 10 different typefaces..
I strung together a site recently where the brief was to allow the user to play music continuously whilst accessing the entire content of the site - a popup was out of the question, so I had to pipe the output of the cms into the main content div - had to dynamically rewrite any internal links to trigger the ajax to repopulate the content div, it was literally, a hack, yet the only way to achieve what I wanted and not use flash, but of course, same fucking 10 fonts Ive been staring at for 20 years now. Bullshit it is..- 1 word solution: frames.monNom
- two word reply:
19 99mikotondria3 - it's still the same html from 99 toomonNom
- ukit0
that's funny miko I have actually been involved in the creation of a similar site...so it sounds like we've both had real world experience with exactly this edge case scenario of wanting to play continuous music on a site.
But I don't get how rewriting the URL is any more or less of a hack whether you are using Flash or HTML. There are plenty of web apps that work this way, and I don't really see it as a hack.
I just think all Flash is a mistake unless the site needs to provide a marketing type experience (not content based). The rise of JQuery based animation and Javascript based text replacement just negates the need for it even more.
- mikotondria30
yeh - it just depresses me that a simple vision of the web such as a site that does that needs such a circuitous method to get it done.
When you say rewriting the urls, you mean dynamically changing whats in the address bar, so people can deep link etc, yeh ?
- ukit0
Right - with Flash, that needs a separate JS piece to make it work anyway, right? And even with that, the Beatport site is buggy as hell - on Chrome, it sometimes gets stuck on the page you're on, it's annoying.
- cramdesign0
As it is, Flash is simply not as well suited to heavy content as is html.
- is that a restriction of the player/browser ?mikotondria3
- monNom0
mito: it's a result of HTML being far more specialized at displaying formatted text than flash. If you want to display a page of text, in flash you need to develop the front end to display it. HTML does it natively. as a result, Flash increases development costs.
sure you _CAN_ hack together a way to display a page of formatted text in flash, but it's rarely worth the additional effort.
- amongst other things like real urls, error handling, accessibility(alt text, screen reaaders), search-friendly...et...monNom
- cx3news0
Any more examples of content heavy sites would be awesome