Apathy Sketchpad

There’s literally no excuse for making a whole website in Flash. It’s just not how you do these things. It’s like uploading a YouTube video of scrolling text, or making a Twitter account connected to nothing but an RSS feed. It won’t work on screen readers, most phones or many computers. It will need more CPU and more memory, you can’t usually link to individual pages, they load slowly, you have to implement things like scrollbars from scratch which means mouse-wheels, trackpad scrollers and keyboard shortcuts don’t work and the scrollbar itself behaves strangely or incompletely, most search engines can’t crawl it, browser functions like in-page find don’t work, often you can’t copy-paste from it, and it won’t reshape itself to unusually sized windows. There’s just no excuse.

Cleverer people than corporate webmasters have designed web standards over two decades and by now they’re pretty damn good (though still way off ideal). You can do very impressive stuff without even invoking Flash, and the sheer arrogance of these people to think they can design a better site from the ground up is bewildering.

Probably, many of them are just following orders from managers who want Flash sites and don’t understand the issues with them. I don’t care. That’s not an excuse. It didn’t fly at Nuremberg and it won’t fly here.