Why I Don’t Like Flash

When I was working on my new design for this web­site, I spent a lot of time eval­u­ating my options for image dis­play, as it’s one of the most vital ele­ments of the site. I had very spe­cific require­ments for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the gal­leries, and the ease of imple­men­ta­tion. I spent for­ever looking through all sorts of Word­Press plu­gins, hacks, and stand­alone solu­tions, and even­tu­ally set­tled (grudg­ingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the Sim­ple­Viewer plugin.

Of course, after spending for­ever (I stopped counting some­where along the line) spent making it work pre­cisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my port­folio is now dis­playing with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth hap­pened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My con­tact form plugin had also deac­ti­vated itself without my noticing some­where along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the Sim­ple­Viewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and imple­menting the change, so things are going to look ter­rible between now and then.) I found an alter­na­tive that I think will be better, and sim­pler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every port­folio post and upload new gal­leries: Gal­lifrey, based on Gal­ler­iffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll rec­og­nize this as The Doctor‘s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Word­Press’ built-in gallery func­tions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to imple­ment my triple-bordered image dis­play that I wanted ini­tially for this site. Sim­ple­viewer, you were fan­tastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

When I orig­i­nally designed this gallery dis­play, most people didn’t notice the dif­fer­ence between the triple-border here and the single thick border unless I explic­itly pointed it out. Turns out I’m a touch anal-retentive.

Can Flash go into the ground already? There was a time when it was useful for web­sites, but with jQuery and a myriad of other frame­works as well-developed as they are, there really is very little excuse for it any­more. There are all sorts of rea­sons why Flash is bad: it’s hor­rible for search engine opti­miza­tion, it mucks with usability, it’s often slow to load, it refuses to dis­play on an iPhone, and it won’t print or dis­play itself in a feed reader (at least, best I can tell). While the number of web­sites relying on Flash has decreased dra­mat­i­cally in the past few years, it’s still a little too preva­lent. No more Flash, okay? There’s always an alternative.

Some­times you just need to screw up enough to find it.

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