I had an interesting thought tonight that I thought I’d share. Most of the recent Flash/Flex website fall into three primary categories in terms of interaction: applications, web page emulation or the ever-loathed eccentric designs. Obviously, applications are Flash sites that behave much more like traditional desktop applications. However, the other category is usually seen when someone is making a flash site in lieu of an HTML site, so we get a design that has behavior similar to HTML pages. Click button (Request), go to “page” with content (Response). “Page” transitions are pretty, but the use of these transitions usually add an extra unnecessary 200-300kb on the download. We’ve all seen our fair share of these sites, some hit some miss. The last category is the eccentric design category. These are the Flash sites you go to and spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to navigate (or read instructions) and when you do, you get an experience worse than category 2.

Everyone hates the last category, tolerates, the second, and are usually very accepting of the last (only for those applications that follow typical application behaviors). There has to be some middle ground between the second two. Interaction that is neither entirely Request-Response nor eccentric. What would that be? I think what I’m looking for here is a paradigm that allows for standardized navigation but also asymmetrical flow of information. I’m not saying it would work, but it would certainly be worth exploring. Possibly some type of AI could be used that acts as a broker between the user and the content. How’s that for out of the box? An AI driven website?

As of tonight, I decided to discontinue pursuing future projects in the area of traditional HTML/CSS design. This is partly based on my mounting frustrations with the CSS standard, that despite being explicitly defined by the W3C, has never been fully and properly implemented by any browser. Every designer instinct tells me that CSS is necessary and not to use table designs, but recently I’ve found it increasingly hard to rationalize this as a benefit against productivity.

As far as I’m concerned, technology should be an aid in my pursuit of the holy grail of Design. If the technology is too old, or just not up to par with my needs and expectations, than I have no other recourse but to pursue other technology that lets me do what I want consistently and with the relative ease I expect. To this end, I have recently put much time into developing with Flex, and in the future plan on working with Silverlight (as much of an Adobe fan as I am, I’d be a fool not to learn more about the competition, for more info, see Blue Ray). I like pushing the edge, and to me, CSS feels like a hack to make HTML, nearly a 30-year old technology, look decent. Ditto on JavaScript in terms of AJAX (that aside, I love what JavaScript is, just not how it is used).
Another factor in this decision is a shift in career focus for me. While I intend on continuing my design skills, I find myself enjoying application programming more and more each day. I find myself more challenged with this, but challenged in a good way.

I find it so much more rewarding not to be fighting the technology, but instead fighting against my own lack of knowledge as I push myself into these areas of programming that are, at least to me, new. I don’t feel like I’m giving up on HTML/CSS. In fact if anything, I consider my journey through HTML/CSS based design complete. It’s been a mix of good and bad, but what I take from it are the lessons and the experience.

So here I am, feeling at a crossroads of sorts. While I find comfort in what I’ve learned, I feel the urge to push forward, and while my past and the present is important, in many ways they both hold me back.

Now all along you’ve probably been wondering about that little picture up there. It’s for the analogy I’m about to give you: Living as a developer/web designer is much like swinging along on monkey bars. You want to keep moving because if you stop too long on one rung, you lose your momentum, you risk losing your grip, and even if you want to start moving again, it’s not that easy.

RIP, HTML/CSS
2002-2008

I got a little email in my inbox the other day that frankly, surprised, irked, and amused me simultaneously. The email was from CSSFlash telling me that my site had been added successfully to their gallery. This puzzled me for a few minutes until after looking at their site I was able to vaguely remember submitting this site about 3 months ago! Now, I can understand that for a site that updates every 90 minutes with new CSS sites that they have to be about as loaded down with add requests as can be. So I figure OK, they were very busy, didn’t have until now to get to me.

Not quite true. Apparently CSSFlash simply took a screenshot of this site 2-3 months ago, queued it up, and it took until now for it to appear on the front page. I’m happy I was accepted to a CSS design site. But I redesigned this site back in November! And frankly, the design back then wasn’t that great. So now my opportunity for some free traffic is for nil.

But wait! The email they sent me said I should simply email them back if there were any problems! So I did. I even gave them the courtesy of taking a screenshot myself for them to use. No response. Thumbnail on their site hasn’t changed either. Much annoyance on my end.

I would have just hoped, that for a site like that they would be serious enough about it to have some quality control over what comes out. All it would have taken would be to click on the link to see something wasn’t right…

Update: As of 2/23/08, I have received no response nor has the image been updated. Seems the owners of CSSFlash have all but abandoned any responsiveness to their emails.

I have come to the realization that markup languages are the bane of any evolution developers and  (especially) designers want to see in the web in the near future. With some of the new features coming out for Flex 3 I have begun to wonder why we need to still be dealing with markup languages. Markup languages have been around in some form for the better part of 30-40 years. HTML itself is nearing its 20 year old birthday. Of course, there will be all the people screaming that things have changed since the first HTML specification, namely things like JavaScript and CSS which sprouted other methodologies such as Ajax. I am certainly a fan of both JavaScript and CSS but doesn’t the problem lie with the fact that we need these technologies in the first place? Flash has been reported to have reached 99.1% of all desktop Internet users.

Now, I have become a bit of an Adobe fanboy recently, but even if that wasn’t the case I would still have to say that right now programming website with Flex 3 and AS3 is looking far more promising and headache free than anything else I’ve seen. Who else other than Adobe has offered web developers a way to render their sites the same way on many browsers with no additional effort through Flash? Sure, bookmarking and SEO have been issues in the past, but the Flex 3 release will begin to fix much of that.

Next on the list of arguments is those that argue that Flash content can be a costly download to those with slower connections. Well frankly, the people with dial-up should know that in most areas faster ISPs are available, often for less. The fact is most ISPs these days are not dial-up and as a result most dial-ups simply can’t compete in the price wars anymore and still stay in business. The onus is on the individual to be a savvy consumer.

So what’s the roadblock?

• We need browsers to treat Flash files no differently than text files.
• Keep going on making Flash internal bookmarking more effective.
• More Flash SEO.
• More Flash security. Certainly there’s no thing as 100% secure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t aim for 99%.

And the final, big one.

• We need to put the pressure on the consumer to WANT flash sites. We want anyone going to look at any XHTML/CSS site to give it the same sour look any web developer would give a 90’s era Geocities website.

Hopefully, we can begin to see some changes toward a more multimedia based web experience within a few years.