Enabling Deep Linking in Flash – Changing my mind on experience sites in general.

Filed under Flash, Industry, Work by Chad | 3 comments

I have been developing flash long enough to become jaded in regards to getting sent links to the newest hot Flash sites out there. Big deal. We have seen enough tweens and clever perspective tricks. Integrated video? How 2005. Blurs and dynamic dropshadows. *yawn* Granted, yes, the art is fantastic. The blurring of lines between video effects and Flash is awesome. But, the drawbacks have long been enough for me to say that a site should primarily be built with HTML and only have smatterings of Flash throughout it.

Where does this lack of enthusiasm come from? Partially from the fact that navigating a large monolithic 100% Flash based site is cumbersome. It’s impenetrable by search engines. It’s impossible to bookmark. Sending a URL for a specific screen/scene in a movie to a friend. Fuggeddabouddit.

Anyway… I’m starting to warm to the idea of some of the projects I have going at work because of some great new scripts coming out that allow us to get around some of those issues. The brilliant SWFObject was a great first step in solving the non-standard compliant “

I have a couple of projects currently inflight that will be deployed some time this quarter that will be using both of these libraries. I’m excited once again by the prospect of producing a Flash based site for a client. These scripts have freed me from my typical “killjoy” anti-flash stance by helping me be able to produce more accessible multimedia.

Posted on February 1, 2007

3 comments

1. Brian Feb 1

   I agree wholeheartedly. These new libraries have been the only reason why I’d consider doing 100% Flash site, too. The only things I’m still worried about are truly allowing Google to get into content for crawling and searching purposes, and building Flash sites that have frequently updated data (especially integrating with some sort of CMS). Perhaps the solution relies then on a CMS which, in the background, is publishing XML files that Flash loads for its content.

2. Shakey Feb 5

   I’ve had a rudimentary CMS serving up XML for about 18 months now, and I’m expanding it all the time. It’s really a godsend to get some proper easy-to-maintain dynamic data into Flash. I’d honestly not know what I’d do without it now!

   Throw in some deep-linking and implement the browser’s back button as best we can (hell, even have Flash body text selectable) and we find that 100% Flash sites are once again viable.

   I even think Googlebot is starting to get inside Flash and index the text stored therein. If that’s the case then we’re really on a roll!

3. Benny Jan 21

   Deep linking for Flash is great, but it is still quite hard to implement (for noobs) in my opinion. I’m an interactive designer myself. There should be books written about it, because every Flash developer making a Flash website should adopt it. I have seen a lot of great examples of full Flash websites with deep linking that worked great. I hope this trend of better usable Flash websites will change the perception of it. I’m sick of people saying Flash should not be used for websites. At least fully. Imo if done properly a Flash website can be as usable (even better) than a HTML version. It just depends on what kind of websites you want to make.

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