At the risk of being burnt...

[Steve Garwood]

to death by Flames :-)

Flash, Java, Javascript, HTML, Animations, 8pt text....

As long as we know our USERS and are meeting their needs isn't that the 
point?

Granted we can't design all sites for all people, but I do think that the 
AUDIENCE focus is paramount. I.E. if I was designing a site for College age 
students, I'd want a different feel, look, etc. than a site for the 
Elderly.

IMHO, I think libraries as a whole can win the "Ugliest sites ever created" 
award as an "industry" and especially in this era of trying to attract 
younger audiences, perhaps including some of these technologies (gratuitous 
as they may seem to be) isn't such a bad idea.

Flame Away :-)

Steve

*************************************************************************
Steve Garwood
Program and Services Coordinator, INFOLINK
Tel: 732-752-7720  Fax: 732-752-7785
Toll free: 866-505-LINK  Fax: 800-793-8007
Email to: sgarwood at infolink.org
Web: http://www.infolink.org
"Leadership can be summed up in two words: 'Follow Me'" - Richard Marcinko
*************************************************************************

-----Original Message-----
From:	Thomas Dowling [SMTP:tdowling at ohiolink.edu]
Sent:	Monday, August 05, 2002 12:26 PM
To:	Multiple recipients of list
Subject:	[WEB4LIB] Re: browser differences

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