[WEB4LIB] Re: flash image on our home page

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

Karen Harker wrote:
> 
> I think that the primary reason given for rejecting such
> technology is load time.

Load times are important, but they're not the primary considera-
tion.  The primary consideration is that, with Flash, you're leav-
ing yourself stuck with non-standard, proprietary technology that
will be hard to maintain, upgrade, and manipulate automatically.

The best technology to use at this point is plain XHTML.  Why?
Because it displays on current browsers - and older ones as well.
Yet it offers a fairly smooth upgrade path to XML (since it will
actually parse as well-formed XML).

XML is easy to process and manipulate (in case you need to make
sweeping or automated changes).  More and more tools - and even-
tually _all_ web authoring tools - will be able to understand
and work with it.

Best of all, it's non-proprietary.  XHTML also doesn't require
any plug-ins and correctly, unlike Flash, separates content from
presentation.

Another consideration with Flash is that it doesn't admit the same
sorts of customization that XHTML will.  Users with, e.g., im-
paired vision (e.g., poor red/green color differentiation, like I
have), or no vision, or various other impairments, can't easily
change the way the information is presented to that they can use
it effectively.

Note, by the way, that well written HTML converts trivially to
XHTML (using, e.g., tools like 'tidy').

I know that I'm just repeating points made in an earlier posting,
but it seems clear that they merit reiteration.  Load times are
certainly an issue.  But not the primary one.  If Flash material
loaded faster, it would still be a bad idea to use it.

If this point seems lost, I'd recommend reading a good book on
XML - or even crawl back into some of the seminal literature on
SGML, which really makes most of the same points that the XML
literature does today.

It's especially important for librarians (for whom data formats
and lifetimes are especially important issues) to understand the
reasons for separating content and presentation - and to under-
stand why XML and XSL were originally introduced.  (Yes, XML is
treated like kind of a panacea now.  But there really were good
reasons why everyone got disgusted with where HTML was going,
and why newer, intelligently constructed text markup schemes are
almost all XML based.  It all had to do with issues like tracta-
bility and separating presentation from content).

-- 

Richard Goerwitz                               richard at Goerwitz.COM
tel: 401 438 8978