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Being in the website design industry, and having regualr contact with clients who have a basic understanding of the web, you start to notice the same topics of conversation come up time and time again. One of the common dogmas which tends to arise is the “we cant put anything below the fold”, basically referring to the practice of trying to keep your important content “above the fold” (so no scrolling is required to see it).

The logic is fundamentally sound – “dont put anything important below the fold”, so its fairly difficult to make a counter case when a situation calls for it. This is especially so when you’re up against a particularly strong advocate of the fold being the “edge” of the page (don’t get too near or you might sail off the edge of the internet!). A good article to refer people to next time this discussion comes up is The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing (via 456 berea street). The article, which is based on data from over 800 user testing sessions, makes the case that the fold is not a significant barrier to users viewing the full length of the page.

The article is full of clear points and supporting screenshots and test data, and some important key points are made to conclude…

  1. 1. Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.
  2. 2. Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling – this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.
  3. 3. Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars – the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

Definately recommended reading if you get the chance.


Flash is the Bane of the Internet

The Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia application created by Macromedia (now a division of Adobe Systems). Flash Player features support for both vector and raster graphics, along with a scripting language and bidirectional streaming of video and audio content. The player is a virtual machine that runs Flash files, which are often embedded in websites to present animations, games, GUIs, or other visual interestingness. If you’re reading this website, you probably know all of this. What you might not know is that Flash sucks. It is the bane of the Internet, and it needs to go away.

Usability and Accessibility

The ironic thing about Flash is that its use is so frequently self-defeating. Flash is often used in an attempt to make sites more user friendly. But replacing familiar browser components with custom Flash garbage only hurts usability. Consistency is imperative for a UI — users learn how to do something once, and can apply that knowledge in tons of places. But with Flash, overzealous designers try to “fix” what they see as bad interface models by creating custom Flash crap. This sucks.

While we’re on usability, let’s talk about people who are disabled. Flash sucks at accessibility. Though Flash has some features that are supposed to improve accessibility, they’re weak and almost never used. The fact of the matter is that Flash is pretty much inherently inaccessible. If you want to use Flash, and remain accessible (and indexable — web spiders can’t understand Flash binaries either), your only real option is to create a second version of your site that uses standard technologies. That sucks.

Technically, the accessibility and usability issues apply only to poorly designed Flash sites. Someone could (and probably will) counter that it’s not Flash that sucks, but people who are using Flash the wrong way. I’d argue that a tool that encourages suckiness is itself inherently sucky, but I’ll spare you that schpeel and move on to the one thing that makes Flash incontrovertibly sucky, regardless of how you use it.

Closed Specification

Call me idealistic, but I hate companies that use closed specifications to stifle competition. And that may be my biggest issue with Flash. Sure, Adobe provides the SWF and FLV Specifications to developers who want to create Flash content. But first you have to agree to the SWF File Format Specification License where you promise that you will “not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders SWF files.” That sucks.

Don’t care about the closed specification issues? Well, you should. As more and more content is stored in Adobe’s proprietary format, the company is gaining a tremendous amount of power. They’ve already announced a version of Flash that includes DRM support, allowing “copyright holders” to prevent users from skipping advertisements and restrict copying. Heck, digital rights management (DRM), combined with the overly restrictive anti-circumvention legislation in the DMCA, could make it illegal to download and save your own damned YouTube videos! That would definitely suck.

Glad to see Adobe has it’s priorities straight. While they rushed to include DRM support, the company has been dragging it’s feet on Flash support for 64-bit operating systems (there is none). This problem is years old. And it’s not like the advent of 64-bit CPUs was a surprise. They should have been working on 64-bit Flash in the late 1990s — or they should have at least given it some thought! And, seriously, it’s taken a team of coders more than two years to port a plugin from 32-bit to 64-bit? Christ, Apple ported an entire operating system from a RISC to a CISC chipset in less time than that. Sounds like the Flash code-base sucks too.

So what’s the alternative?

Yea, you got me. That’s what really sucks. Microsoft Silverlight might provide a viable alternative once it’s released. But chances are it will suck at least as much as Flash. Maybe if the W3C standards for SVG and SMIL are ever fully implemented a decent open solution will exist and the problem will go away (if you’re in Firefox, check out some of the SVG samples, they’re pretty cool). But until then, we’re stuck with Adobe’s crap. So I implore you: use it right, and only when absolutely, positively, unquestionably and undeniably necessary.

Grafted from ImMike


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