Leaving flash development

I started doing websites in Flash back in the 2000, full Flash websites. It was a thrill since the Flash development world gives you extreme possibilities to develop dynamic and animated websites.

The flash indexing solution

Then i started worrying about indexing (see swfaddress), and found out about Flash deep-linking, a viable solution to full website indexing: with it you can deep-link the webpages trough Javascript functions that links "states" with anchor (#) links (see for example the Rrd Y13 and Rrd Y14 websites), index an alternate Html page, and redirect the user with .htaccess from Html pages to the Flash "states".

The big problem with this solution is that anyway the google indexed pages are without #, but the user's linked pages are with #, so the urls are different and you lose some pagerank/links with the search engines. I had a big problems in the 2009 because i couldn't decide how to build websites: to develop with this solutions, or start to develop in Html?

Since i had to study the new version of the Flash language Actionscript 3, and since at the time Jquery and Ajax started to rock the web, i decided to start learning Html, Css, and Php, and i've been very happy with that decision.

The qualities of html over flash

• With Flash you can't really use the backend to choose the content to be visualized, or at least if you do you have to repeat the procedure on the frontend side that gets the data.
• The design bounds are very different: with Flash you have full creativity over the design elements and animations, with Html you have instead to follow the Css rules and the block elements floats, which fulfill the needs of a "magazine" type of website in laying out the content, but it give some restrictions if you have to animate the objects.
• With Flash you don't have Css to do the design job, you have to script it all from Actionscript, which is good for animations, but it has limitations and is and more time consuming if you have a website structures as a grid or as a magazine.
• With Html you have 3 layers of complexity to form the data and style it (the backend, the Html, the Css) each one doing it's job, while in Flash you have only the Actionscript, so the code becomes very complicated while you advance in the development.
• With Html development you have the possibility to focus much more on the backend side, since it's the only level of complexity for formatting the data.
• In Html you have advertise tool (Adsense, BuySellAds, ...), blog tools (Wordpress, Joomla, ...) and forum tools that in Flash are almost inexistent.

The qualities of flash over html

• With Flash you have a much more powerful tool to animate the web page, it's all scripted with full freedom of actions.
• With Flash you deploy once and run everywhere with the same results, the player is installed on a great slice of user's machines, see the Flash player penetration rate.
• Flash works on every installation the same way, you don't have the discrepancies of Html where every version of Internet Explorer behaves in a different way.
• In Flash the layout is as you want, you aren't tied on the Html and Css layout where everything is mounted in a certain way and you don't have the freedom to animate the layout.

Conclusions

Overall I've to say the two development methods are very different and each one have it's strengths and drawbacks. I personal prefer the Html one, the only thing that i miss is the freedom of the animation in Flash, but I'm not turning back.