Archive for web development

Flash CS5 SWF embedding issues

// May 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // Flash, awesomeness, rambling, web development

I’ve been messing around with this Flash CS5 30 day trial at work and thus far it will be a fantastic upgrade when I eventually buy it. Not because of new features or the “Adobe interface” (which honestly is just Adobe tabs wrapping old Macromedia UI elements), but because Flash CS5 is a Universal Binary for Intel powered Macs. And…wow. What a difference. CS5 launches in barely a second, the publishing of SWFs is incredibly fast, and the application UI feels much more responsive.

Anyway, on to the point of my post. Flash CS5 changes the default way the app publishes content. In addition to the HTML / SWF it has always created, it now creates a separate Javascript file that the HTML file must use in order for the SWF to appear in a browser.

Embedding with Javascript has been something most seasoned Flash developers have been doing for years, but until now its been kept away from general Flash users. CS5 changes all that. Every Flash user, from beginner on up, will be required to upload this JS file, as well as copy plenty more player embed code if they want to embed movies in a separate HTML document (and then figure out how to change the embed src link to the requisite JS file).

Was there a way around this? Not really. Macromedia/Adobe were caught between a rock and a hard place with the whole Eolas/Internet Explorer lawsuit – which forced a change to how the most popular browser on the planet (grrrr) embeds rich media content – and prevented Flash movies all over the web from auto-playing, not to mention those heinous “Click here to activate” confirmation dialogs. Including a Javascript file resolves these issues, but it’ll undoubtedly make life more difficult for Flash beginners.

Is Flash dead? I hope not

// May 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // rambling, web development

As you know, I am a big Flash and HTML person. Flash and HTML5 do completely different things. They share a lot of features, yet each technology remains so unique that both will stay in the market for many years to come. Neither the one-sided push from Apple nor the fanatic zealotry of HTML5 advocates will take Flash out of the market. But if one thing is certain, the days of using Flash for trivial tasks that *do* require accessibility are over. The bad side of Flash is not the product itself, it’s developers misusing it for tasks it was not intended to do. If you look at the short history. Flash enabled utterly amazing things on the web in times when static-ness and ugliness ruled. The problem is that it was too easy to create. All of a sudden un-capable people could have created “amazing” things. The fact that Flash could be abused so easily is part of what make some people hate it. Even if we declare Flash as dead today, it’ll be a very lengthy process measured in years at best. And since, yet again, Flash isn’t dead yet. It has all this time to reinvent itself, Adobe should use this time wisely. If you tell me you don’t use Flash, you’re basically telling me that you have never seen a video or played a game online?! The browser wasn’t chosen to be the ultimate way to deliver new and cool applications because of it’s wonderful capabilities. It became as such because it’s the lowest common denominator. Maybe it’s time for a better lowest common, Flash was a step in the right direction, maybe we’ll be better with something more powerful like Steam. Actually the browser was also “chosen” because it’s very easy to create content for it.

HTML5 and WAI-ARIA drama llamas

// April 12th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized, web development

Lately I was reading there was some noise surrounding HTML5 and the myth of WAI-ARIA redundance. It surprises me how quickly finding the actual problem here is dismissed as “who knows.” It almost seems as if some part of the accessibility community has shifted from promoting the writing of clean markup, to promoting write whatever the fuck you want as long as you make it accessible. Write whatever you want with some WAI-ARIA sugar on top is in some scenarios the only thing what works right now. I do not believe that means we should just let it run its course. The real solution to making a button implemented using five div elements and some scripting accessible is not WAI-ARIA. It is to drastically improve the styling capabilities of <input type="button">.

The solution to making new patterns accessible is to create smarter ways for people to do them that are automatically accessible and do not require annotation with WAI-ARIA. WAI-ARIA is still useful to push the envelope, but the long tail of the Web is just not going to care enough. It would be terrible if only the top five hundred or so websites in each country were accessible mostly due to accessibility advocacy groups. Especially since we have the ability to do much better than that.

As an example take the new HTML5 progress element. It greatly simplifies creating a progress bar and when implemented correctly in user agents it is automatically accessible. However, the whole user interface part of the element is somewhat up in the air. I do not think I am personally the right person to work on that, but that is the kind of problem we should be trying to tackle.