Flash vs HTML

[george at library.caltech.edu]

An interesting research article appeared in the current issue of Journal of
Electronic Publishing.

An Experimental Study: The Relationship Between Multimedia Features and
Information Retrieval
      <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-03/raney.html>
      Arthur A. Raney, Jeremy R. Jackson, Debbie B. Edwards, Karrie L.
      Schaffler, Jean Blutenthal Arrington, and Melissa R. Price
      subjected volunteers to Web sites with and without animation
      and multimedia features to see whether flashy graphics helps
      users.

The largest flaw that I see in the research is that the Flash and HTML sites
they chose for comparison were top of the line, professionally produced
commercial sites.  The second gaping flaw was no control for bandwidth
limitations.

If a similar study were done with the amateur/semi-professional Flash and
HTML navigation that predominates on the web, I posit that rudimentary tasks
are more easily accomplishable in an HTML site than a Flash site created by
persons with an equal number of hours of experience/instruction in the
technologies.

Further, if using less than state of the art browsers/workstations/Internet
connections (read: real world conditions), the enjoyability factor for Flash
would drop off the edge of the world.

Compound the situation with the possibility that the desktop is centrally
administered and does not support Flash, a not uncommon corporate or
institutional scenario, and the entire exercise really is academic.

Still, I was surprised by the results and gratified that people (not
employed by MacroMedia) are actually doing solid research in this area.

George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
Caltech, 1-43
Pasadena, CA  91125-4300
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681