Posted by cwdjrxyz@yahoo.com on 10/16/07 11:36

Bald Purp wrote:
> I never bothered to install any Flash plugin, hoping year after year
> that it would eventually just go away.
>
> Are there any cogent arguments against the use of Flash?

As with any media presentation method, flash can be used well or
abused. Since flash is so much more popular for ads than many other
multi-media presention methods, it gets abused more than many other
methods. It is quite possible to design a flash movie so that it will
only start if you right click it and select to play, or you can use a
start button. Of course for many ads, this is the last option that they
would want to give you. If the code for flash is properly written, you
will not even know that there was flash there if the browser does not
support flash. But much flash code apparently is written and tested on
IE6 only, and such code sometimes produces unexpected results on other
browsers.

For simple animations, an animated gif often will work well, and is not
too difficult to construct on PaintShop which also includes an
animation program. For more movie-like flash presentations, you run
into the fact that the files can become rather large. You must consider
what you are going to do about dialup users that may not want to wait
up to a few minutes for complete download or buffering before
streaming. The logical thing might be to use a bandwidth select button
for the user so that he or she gets a jpg on dialup and the flash movie
on broadband, with the default as the jpg. It also sometimes is
possible to automatically detect the type of connection the browser is
using, and some large media sites appear to be doing this.

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