I agree with all people who dislike the website navigation
done with Flash. I believe, that it is just one of those "waves".
Earlier, we've seen animated gifs all over the websites
with things jumping at you; background music playing as long as your
browser is open with a particular page, unwarranted Java-based pages,
etc. People who first encounter something that is looks different
tend to use that, thinking it is cool. And if the customers pays,
web-designers do what is ordered.
I think this trend of flash-based web-pages will pass sooner or later.
However, I think that the statement from you, Glenn, quoted below
is not completely correct. Indeed, the idea behind HTML was to make
it universal for all platforms and browsers. However, the implementation
is far from that. This drives some web-designers to use a more unified
way such as Flash, Java-plugin, etc.
There are some web-page needs which
are rather hard to implement properly in HTML (even with javascript),
for exactly the reasons you listed: variations in the browser window size,
browser type, and (what is hard to catch in Windows) - font size.
E.g. if you configure your Windows to use "large fonts (125%)",
the pages that rely on certain width (e.g. with tables), - may
be messed up. Yes, there are some ways around that, but most of them
are not elegant.
On another hand, the flash-based viewers provided by LightRoom have
capability of determining the browser window size and display the photos
in the size most suitable for it (small, medium, large, according to
their definitions).
I think that is a easy and relatively good (compared to what else is
currently available) solution.
So, even though I use lynx sometimes, and prefer text-based menus on
webpages, I think the Flash viewer for photo galleries may be a good
solution. The main downside to it is that the Flash-based viewers
provided by LightRoom load all the photos at once, which maybe
bad for a large gallery.
BTW, Flash viewers don't really protect photos from being "stolen":
it deters only some inexperienced users ("security by obscurity").
All those photos ARE downloaded and saved on your computer when
you watch them.
Igor
Wed Sep 19 15:01:41 EDT 2007
dglenn wrote:
> > It's not about stealing photo's, it's about ensuring that your
> > site looks the way you designed it.
>
> Bzzzt! You _can't_. Not reasonably. You don't know how big my
> screen is, how much of it I've given to the browser, or what the
> screen resolution is set to. (Worse, you don't know whether I
> even have Flash installed in the browser I'm using today -- gee,
> I see an awful lot of interesting-sounding links that lead me to
> an all black page.) If my screen is a different size then yours,
> then either I'll have to scroll horizontally to read anything
> (one of the faster ways to get me to give up and go read something
> else instead) or leave a big empty space around it.
>
> HTML is designed to make such problems go away. The price? The
> designer has to give up the "I Precisely Control Every Exact Detail
> Absolutely" mindset and let the browser, and the user, make some
> of those decisions.
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