Realigning the Azimuth

After reading the I Am Not an Animal – I’m a Flash Developer piece earlier this week on MacTalk – I couldn’t help but take stock of some of the points of view taking up.

In one regard – the biggest thing which popped out of my face is the defensiveness of the author, a trait which I can’t help but feel is becoming more & more widespread over the last few months in particular. Part of me can’t help but feel it’s just in reaction to the rising importance of the mobile web in the present time, and due to Apple’s refusal to support Flash in MobileSafari on the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad has helped shine more light on the value of HTML5 & related technologies.

As a code-monkey – both as a web application developer & as an iPhone developer, I can’t help but admit, that I certainly do prefer building my sites from within a tool such as Textmate or Coda instead of within Frontpage or Dreamweaver. It’s typically down to several things… being able to properly build the structure of a page is always important. On top of that, I believe coding by hand makes it much easier to build a solid standards compliant layout, which to me is something which I might not be the best at, but feel it’s imperative to work towards.

It also means I don’t have very much patience for the types of sites that seem to be most popular with the mindset of Flash designers. The types of site where you’re required to sit through an annoying intro. The type of site which throws away any web conventions and throws excessive bling in your face. It feels like a lack of understanding of what exactly the World Wide Web is.

Do I wish Flash was wiped from existence? Actually not. For the most part, it’s still a solid way to bring multimedia into web pages for the moment, as much as I hate to admit it. When I was working on a small web project recently, I found that just including a Flash player to play an audio clip on a particular event (this was a kisok type application) was much easier that trying to wrangle getting HTML5 support in, or relying upon a simple embed call. I also have to concede that without Flash, we wouldn’t have the underlying technologies which made web games feasible. Games like Canabalt, Captain Forever & Desktop Tower Defense possible.

So in the short term, Flash is here to stay. Regardless of that, I feel it can’t be denied that it’s entering its sunset years. Which of course means that we whether as a developer or a designer need to realise this and start focusing on designs which are both friendlier to mobile devices & to true open standards.

In addition, I think it’s a ripe opportunity to raise the importances of designers & developers working in tandem. The idea that a designer is solely responsible for a full site design (and allowed to get away with a heavy design), or that a developer is solely responsible and expected to construct a site containing a world-beating design.

I think the best solution there is to revisit the idea of the developer/designer tag-team. Let the designers create their ideas – but not implement them. The implementation is best left to the developers. That way, the right techniques can be chosen, and the right technologies used, resulting in a superior solution along the way.

But, in environments where this isn’t possible, what about the tooling? Flash & the likes have their position in large because of this. But, if it’s possible for a designer to create an animation and export out into these formats, then it can help break the dependency on those tools in the long term.

The most important thing to consider is the importance of the medium. Typically, the type of site which gets built with Flash is optimised for the displays & bandwidth available to desktop machines. With the greater shift towards mobile computing (thanks to smartphones & netbooks), more importance has to be placed on building sites which can scale across both the desktop and the web.

I believe fundamentally that sites built around heavy multimedia use need to be the exception rather than the norm. By focusing more on sites which are designed around the limitations of the web, I believe that we can create something which is much more beneficial for end users who just wish to get their information as fast as possible, without needing all the glitz & glamour of a high-end site.