The trouble with Flash
Who remembers frames? In the early days frames were used quite a lot and usually very poorly. In fact browser support of frames was a bit spotty. Yet designers saw frames as a way to...well...frame content. Essentially you could build a nav and have all the links in one frame while the content was delivered in another. Also, you could frame other sites which wasn't exactly ethical (when you passed that content off as your own). Anyway, frames stirred up powerful emotions (and still do). Here's some ruminations on frames.

Now if you're asking what frames have to do with Flash I'd say you've actually been reading this with some ammount of interest. The point is that the two main problems with frames is printing and bookmarking/linking, with the primary of the two being bookmarking/linking.

In the Wild

I recently ran across two "flashed" sites with somewhat similar features. Each had some sort of Flash based music creation device and are both pretty neat. While I was playing around with them I thought, "this little device would be great to link to" and that is exactly what I set out to do. However, as you've probably figured out, one of the sites (BPoeM ) has a direct link and the other ( ...t.y.p.o.r.g.a.n.i.s.m... - Visual Composer link) has no such direct link. The problem is now quite evident.

Yet, this doesn't necessarily speak to any shortcomings of Flash itself because both sites are actual Flashed pages. This speaks to the trouble with Flash when used improperly. Some may argue (and have) "this is a Flashed site and the audience of this site expects to navigate a bit to find content so what's the big deal? CNN.com this ain't" and they'd be right to an extent. But what it really says is that "I'm an experienced Flash designer who wants to design something in the easiest possible manner without any thought to Web usability."

The Facts

Let's face it, it IS easier to design a Flashed site as a single page movie element vs. embedding many html pages for the sole purpose of linking. Once this linking is done a world of maintenance quickly follows. So I can't argue that the single page movie is much easier but it is also inferior (in MOST cases but not ALL).

Now before all the Flash 6 folks begin yelling about anchor tags let me say that I know and understand that this is a HUGE step toward usability in Flash. I'm extremely excited about this. Yet, with all things new, the theory has not yet lived up to reality. The application has not yet achieved the proper saturation of the Flashed site market. I'm hopeful that it will in much the way that poor use of frames has all but disappeared from the general, mainstream Web. It's just that right now there are still an awful lot of Flash 4 and 5 sites still out there and many have decided to ignore this weakness of Flash.

Conclusion

So, what to do? Well obviously use anchor tags when designing in Flash 6 or even better begin rethinking the manner of future design. I won't go into other Flash usability issues here but usability should always be a consideration when using a plug-in based application. There are definitely good reasons to ignore some usability issues and browser compatibility issues (WaSP project) but there always needs to be a better reason that "it's just too much trouble to do."

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