[WEB4LIB] Flash vs HTML: Half-Full or Half-Empty?

[Gimon, Charles A]

As I read it, the study claims there is neither an advantage nor a
disadvantage to using Flash if you are measuring the ability to retrieve
information.

So as I see it, the many other disadvantages of Flash (proprietary standard,
awful for document management, bandwidth suck, inaccessible) remain to
advise one against its use on serious sites.

I was amused that a certain percentage of participants seem to be saying "I
didn't find what I wanted on either site, but I enjoyed not finding it in
Flash more!!"

--Charles Gimon
  Web Coordinator
  Minneapolis Public Library


> -----Original Message-----
> From: george at library.caltech.edu [mailto:george at library.caltech.edu] 
> Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 3:39 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Flash vs HTML
> 
> 
> 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.
>