[WEB4LIB] Re: browser differences

[Thomas Dowling]

At 11:37 AM 8/5/2002, Steve Cramer wrote:
>The Journal of Electronic Publishing published an interesting study of users'
>perception of Flash-enable sites.
>
>http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-03/raney.html
>An Experimental Study: The Relationship Between Multimedia Features and
>Information Retrieval


This article was discussed in some detail back in April.  Comments that 
stand out when I reread the thread:

"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." - George Porter

"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." - Charles Gimon

[*Flash MX is supposed to allow substantially accessible Flash
pages, so kudos to Macromedia in that regard.]

"...HTML is not a good language choice for creating sites that look
like they were developed in Flash." - yrs trly

I remain convinced that the great majority of pages using Flash have no 
good reason for doing so, and by supporting a reliance on proprietary 
software impede efforts to create similar open source solutions.  All IMO, 
of course.



Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu