Hi Andreas, Yes I follow your gist. But what you are arguing for is simple design and ering on the side of caution, nothing more, nothing that I would dissagree with either, but having little relation to the Ajax vs Flash choice. Sure Flash gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with, but it also enables working ideas that won't be achieveable otherwise.
Good usability designers don't just use one operating system and don't limit their thinking to what they have seen on a computer. They think about car dashboards and apple slicers and the pencil as much as interface ideas. Primarily they do a lot of testing. My experience is similar to both yours and your web designers, but I never forget the end user. My whole reason for developing is to see the end user smile. Try creating educational software with Ajax and the Dom, it's painfull and it won't work on some browsers. It gets in the way of user smiles when it doesn't work and you need to find out which subversion of what browser they are using in order to even fix the problem. But if the web worked well, nobody would be interested in using either Flash or Ajax for applications. The truth is it doesn't. During my reply to your last rant I used my mouse's scrollbar and it flew me right out of gmail. whoosh. It was funny but totally mystified me. Beta software. Ajax software, some nice ideas, some bad ideas, generally immature. Lets talk about the back button. Do you think users really know how the back button works? I once created a training application for state workers on how to use a browser and I feel pretty confident saying the back button was broken long before Flash ever entered the equation. It's a list that you can travel backward and forward except that the forward part dissapears on you now and again when you click on a link and the backward part can put you in a seemingly endless loop depending on your sequence of clicks. Talk about a computer scientists notion of how navigation should work. It's not how users think. Even users who tell you that they know how it works, when tested are easily mystified by how it really works. GIve users an application where they can press "save" and give their state a name that they can load later and they understand it. Why has tabed browsing become so popular? Because in order for the back button to really work you need to be able to have more than one instance of the browser window to properly navigate the web. So knowledgable users would have a List of links in front of them and they would open a new browser instance for each one, knowing that it might become impossible or take 100 clicks after browsing a sites content, to get back to where they are. Tabbed browsing just made this more convienient. But it is already broken and has been for a dozen years and it needs to be improved further. _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list [email protected] http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
