21 years gone: remembering life as a 15-year-old Rush fan

For much of the past decade I’ve been systematically reliving my childhood. I’m not totally sure what stirred up this extended wave of nostalgia, but it may have something to do with the simple fact that I have vivid memories of things I did 20-plus years ago.

It started in 2002, on the 20th anniversary of my acquisition (as an 8-year-old second grader) of an Atari 2600. I went crazy back in that summer of 2002, buying up lots (as in, auction lots, on eBay) of the games I never managed to convince my parents to buy me as a child. In the end I wound up with over 350 games in my collection, counting duplicates, including a dozen copies each of Combat and Pac-Man.

This year I’ve been rekindling my middle school obsession with baseball. (Good timing, with the Twins in a new stadium and playing exceptionally well.) I went so far as to bid on a complete Topps 1985 baseball card set, but lost in the final bidding war I didn’t expect would happen. Back in the day I owned thousands of baseball cards, mostly from the 1984-1988 Topps sets, but ironically I sold the entire collection on eBay back in 2002 to fund my Atari collection. I should have had more foresight.

And then there’s Rush. My long-dormant obsession with the band I spent so much of high school listening to (when I wasn’t — ugh — reading Ayn Rand) had been renewed back around 2002 as well, when I played briefly in a Rush cover band in Atlanta, and then in 2007 with the release of their outstanding Snakes and Arrows album. But now I’m really beginning to relive the summer of 1989, when I was 15 and first immersing myself in the band’s already extensive back catalog.

I’m not sure what prompted the latest resurgence. It might have something to do with the great new documentary about the band, which I saw at the Riverview Theater last week. But as with my Atari fixation in 2002, it’s more like there’s just something in the air.

A friend introduced me to Rush during our freshman year of high school, right around the time A Show of Hands was released. That was my first exposure to their music. Or so I thought, until the Replay x3 DVD boxed set was released a few years ago and I suddenly remembered having seen the Grace Under Pressure concert special on MTV back in fifth grade. I know that concert video had a big impact on me (probably because with his New Wave hairstyle Alex Lifeson looked so much like Simon LeBon), but for some reason I never pursued the band further.

Anyway, back to 1989: I had just gotten my first job, bagging groceries for $3.69 an hour (minimum wage), and, flush with cash, I made frequent trips to the local ShopKo store. The store’s electronics and entertainment section was well stocked both with cheap Rush cassettes and cheap (probably bootlegged) PC games. I bought a lot of both that summer.

My first two Rush cassettes were A Farewell to Kings and Signals. Even all these years later, those are probably my two favorite Rush albums, because they had such an impact on my young ears. They were so different, it was hard to believe they were produced by the same band, just five years apart. And yet they were both so good, so unlike anything else I was accustomed to hearing on the radio or on MTV in the late ’80s. (You see, there was once a time when MTV played something called “music videos,” which were just popular songs with visuals, like the band pretending to play their instruments in strange locations. MTV just played music videos… 24 hours a day. And it was good. But not as good as a then-12-year-old Rush album.)

Whenever summer comes along, I start to reminisce about the summers of my youth, especially the summer of 1989. I can see, hear, almost smell my bedroom back then, window open, cool breeze wafting in, “Xanadu” blasting out of my Panasonic boombox on a hissy cassette tape I purchased at ShopKo in the $3.99 cutout bin. (Hey, that was more than an hour’s wages!)

Why am I drawn back so strongly to that summer of 1989? I’m not sure, but I do know something about it that is strongly compelling. Even though I was working at the grocery store, that was still the last summer of my childhood. The next summer, I had my driver’s license, and everything changed. But back in 1989, I was carefree, virtually no responsibilities, and I could just sit in my room and listen to Rush and play Adventure Construction Set on my Tandy 1000 computer.

Maybe part of what reminds me of then is that in some ways, my experience during the summer now is more like 1989 than it has been at any point in my life since. I have plenty of obligations and responsibilities now — I’m married with two kids, mortgage, car payments, etc. But I’m a freelancer, working mostly from home. And like in 1989, I can sit at my computer in my bedroom, cool breeze wafting through the open window, and crank “Xanadu” up to 11. Only now it’s an MP3.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Oh wait, that’s from Hemispheres.

Unchained: a new blog

This is a first: SLP and I are collaborating on a blog. The title is Unchained, and the concept is that we’re taking the summer to try to break ourselves of bad habits where food and exercise are concerned: we’re going to stop shopping at chain stores and restaurants, stop buying national brands, and start getting as much of our food as we can at local markets, co-ops, and on foot or bike. It’s going to be an interesting experiment, and we’re hopeful that, as with one of my other blogs, 52 Coffees, writing a blog can be a catalyst for personal change and growth. Check it out!

The walled city of Kowloon

Today Boing Boing linked to a Dark Roasted Blend feature on three 20th century Asian urban ruins: Hashima Island (or “Battleship Island”) in Japan; the legendary futuristic resort that never quite was, San Zhi, in Taiwan; and perhaps the ultimate unnatural disaster: the walled city of Kowloon.

From this angle, it’s a SimCity player’s worst nightmare. (Or perhaps just a dystopian arcology.) But the reality of the place was (since it no longer exists) beyond anything I could dream up. Wikipedia offers a good overview, but essentially, due to some quirks of history (followed by a period of domination by crime syndicates), this 6.5-acre portion of Kowloon (adjacent to Hong Kong) was, for much of the 20th century, almost entirely unregulated and unpoliced by either the British or the Chinese. Over time it was built up into a giant, dense maze of shops, factories and apartments (not to mention brothels and opium dens), with (in some parts, at least) stunningly squalid living conditions and as many as 50,000 residents.

Eventually the entire thing was leveled in the early 1990s and converted into a park, but the bizarre history remains… told best, perhaps, in a German documentary that is available in its entirety in four parts on YouTube. I don’t speak German, but it’s fascinating to watch even with no sound. And so, here it is…

I was surprised by some of the street-level exterior shots at how colorful and almost seemingly normal (if still insanely dense) the place seemed, but then the camera turned down one of the dark, narrow passageways leading into the heart of the walled city. It was amazing to see these alleys wind left and right (and up and down), fetid water dripping from above, rats’ nests of electrical wiring and water pipes leading off in every direction (not to mention, well, rats’ nests), and then, suddenly, an open doorway leading into a blindingly lit, miniature factory cranking out wonton wrappers or woven fabric or… whatever. I cannot comprehend how this place hadn’t burned down already years earlier, taking most of its residents with it (since there was nothing even remotely resembling a fire escape in the completely unregulated, ad hoc construction).

There’s only one thing in my experience that in any way prepared me for what I saw here: Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Maybe with a bit of Blade Runner thrown in for good measure.

I’m struck by the sheer chaos of this place. It’s jarring to see the elements of a modern structure — electricity, running water, modern building materials, and other technology — assembled with no overall plan, no regulation. In some ways it’s surprising that it’s as orderly — as functional — as it is. In a strange way it’s a testament to the human spirit. Populated largely by refugees, outlaws, and the forgotten (or those the outside world would just as soon forget), it’s amazing how industrious and ambitious (or at least resilient) most of its residents remain despite their living conditions.

Tiny apartments, I expected. Unsanitary markets, I expected. Even the forest of TV antennas and clotheslines on the rooftops didn’t surprise me. All manner of crime wouldn’t surprise me. The thing that totally shocked me about this place was the proliferation of industry in it. There are factories making food; factories making plastics; factories making clothes; metalworks. I can only imagine the miserable heat and stench inside most of these spaces.

And then, a school.

And a church.

As I mentioned, I don’t speak German, but I’m able to pick up enough cognates to make some sense of the narration. Certainly I know what das labyrinth means. And yet, the more I see, and the more I become desensitized to the squalor of the alleyways, the more surprisingly familiar, surprisingly unsuprising, the interiors of the homes and the businesses seem. Everything is incomprehensibly crowded and cluttered, but it’s unmistakably human. But the marginal comforts of home can’t make up for the suffering of the old man lying in a pile of blankets in an alleyway, next to a dead rat, or the profound resignation on many of the silent, pensive faces.

The rooftop, and the courtyard deep inside the heart of the labyrinth, offer a rare glimpse of sunshine, and they make me wonder how often, if ever, the residents of the walled city would venture forth from their anarchic, cyberpunk quasi-prison. Many people in the walled city were (somewhat ironically) there to escape punishment, but most, presumably, had committed no crime. But were they free to leave? Were they stigmatized (or worse) if they dared venture out into the rest of Hong Kong? Answers to these questions may lie in the narration, which I regret I do not understand better.

Unlicensed, unregulated dentists and doctors. When I think of places like this, and practitioners like them, I typically think of unscrupulous hucksters and grotesque, unpunished malpractice. But seeing it in action, after all I’ve seen already, I have a different take. Sure, it may not be approved by the medical establishment, and there may be no recourse for patients who have been treated improperly, but it’s still a practice undertaken with care and effort, genuinely striving to relieve suffering. At least, it can be that.

As evening settles in, a shopkeeper sweeps trash from the alley outside her door. And I realize as my somewhat voyeuristic, entirely vicarious journey into the walled city comes to an end, and as much as I may lay misguided sympathy upon its former residents as I objectify and dehumanize their experience, that they are (or were) real people too, living a life in some ways unimaginably different from my own, and yet in other, deeper ways, strikingly similar. They have families, they work, they eat (even if much of it is stuff I’m too afraid to touch), they create, they perform. Who am I to judge their way of being, especially when I know so little about it, or how it came to be?

But there is one thing in the lives of the former residents of the now disappeared walled city of Kowloon with which I absolutely can relate: its absence.

For all of its wild, chaotic life, its teeming throngs of residents, engaged in every activity imaginable in human existence, all within the space of a few acres, now it is all gone. Open space. Air. And a park.

I can relate to this because it reminds me of a strange place in my own past: Wahlstrom Hall. While no walled city of Kowloon, Walhstrom Hall was quite possibly the strangest, most chaotically architected dormitory in the history of American colleges. I lived there for four years. And now it is gone, leveled just like the walled city, replaced with little more than grass and air. I can’t say that my quadrennium in Wahlstrom really gives me any insight into life in Kowloon’s walled city, but it certainly does contribute to my strange affinity towards this incomparably strange place in Hong Kong that once was, and is no more.

Note: If you’d like a more informed opinion on the Kowloon walled city, here’s a post from a blogger whose dad lived there for 14 years. There’s also an excellent (if somewhat antiquated in its design… and regrettable use of Papyrus font) website devoted to the history of Kowloon Walled City with informative articles and a number of photographs.

Forgot your password? Firefox may be able to help with that

A couple of days ago, I changed my password for the CMS on my website. Unfortunately, Firefox has refused to “remember” the new password, auto-completing the field for me with the old password every time I open it. In the past, when I’ve changed a password, Firefox has offered to remember the new one, but in this instance it did not. (I think I know why, but trying to explain that is outside of the scope of what I care to discuss here today.)

A little query into the Firefox help site provided an answer. Pretty easy, right? But then that got me thinking. Take a look at this screenshot:

You click that “Yes” button, and Firefox is going to display all of your saved passwords in the clear on your computer screen. That’s both incredibly handy, in case you need to remember a password that you’ve forgotten (maybe not even for the site it’s saved with — I’m sure most people reuse the same password[s] most of the time), and incredibly dangerous, in that someone else accessing your computer could open up Firefox and find out all of your passwords.

This leads me to recommend some “best practices” for managing your personal passwords. I follow these rules in order to keep my information (relatively) safe:

1. Don’t use the same password everywhere. It’s unrealistic to think you can remember a different password for every website, but I have a mental store of about 5 or 6 different passwords.

2. Complex passwords are more secure. Your passwords should not contain any dictionary words, and ideally they should contain a mix of upper- and lowercase letters along with numbers and punctuation marks. Also, the longer, the better. It’s really quite amazing how much longer it would take an average modern-day desktop computer to crack an 8-character-long password using this mix of 96 possible characters (23 years), compared to a 6-character-long password using just lowercase letters (30 seconds). Even if you just use lowercase letters, length makes a huge difference: a 20-character, all-lowercase password would take 63 trillion years to crack.

3. Don’t use the same password for your bank that you use for Facebook. This relates to the first item. Reserve your most complex, hardest-to-crack password for the most critical uses: your bank account, PayPal, etc. Generally, anything involving money or the possibility of identity theft (such as a site where you need to provide your Social Security number). Granted, you should probably have a pretty strong password on Facebook, too, but the bottom line is, don’t use your banking password anywhere else.

4. Password-protect your computer, too! This is probably the hardest case for me to make. Especially if you have a desktop computer that just sits in your house all the time, it’s really easy to not bother protecting it. But think about it: if someone breaks into your house, they may be able to steal some of your valuable personal property, but if they’re granted unfettered access to your computer, they could do much more damage than that. In fact, a deft criminal could get in and out without a trace, except that they logged into your computer and stole all of your passwords. If you take your laptop with you to public places where you might leave it unattended at some point, the risk is even greater. And if you’re accessing public networks, physical access to your computer is not even necessary, so a strong password to log into your computer is just as important as the password on your bank account — especially if Firefox has stored an easily-discovered copy of that password on your computer. Which leads to my final recommendation…

5. Resist the temptation to allow your browser to save your most important passwords. I let Firefox “remember” almost all of my passwords. It just makes using the web a lot easier. But I never let it remember my passwords for my bank or PayPal. If you’re only going to file away one convoluted 20-character string in your brain, let it be your bank password. Don’t leave it to Firefox to remember that one for you.

Need more? Symantec has some good recommendations as well.

So just what exactly is behind my dislike of Flash?

Caveat emptor. This is going to be a really long post. But I’ve been saving this up for a long time, and hopefully I can purge myself of it in one sitting. Also, I apologize for that vaguely vomitous metaphor, but it fits my feelings about Flash. And, perhaps, by the end yours as well. So if you have a strong stomach (and care at all about this crap), read on. Otherwise, see you next time.

OK, so I’ve chimed in on the whole Apple vs. Adobe, no Flash on iPhone OS situation before. (And, if you care to scroll back through my history of mostly beer-fueled tweets about the Minnesota Twins, you’ll find a few choice 140-character missives on the matter from me on Twitter as well.) But up to now I’ve never made a clear — or, failing clarity, at least a verbose — argument for why I so strongly dislike Flash. The time has come.

I am well aware that Flash means different things to different groups of people. Essentially, as I see it, there are three main groups of people where Flash is concerned: pro-Flash designers/developers, anti-Flash designers/developers, and users. I don’t bother to distinguish between pro- and anti-Flash among users, because ultimately I don’t think most users (unless they’re also in one of the other two groups) give a crap what technology is behind the content they’re consuming on the Internet. They just want it to work.

So, with this in mind, I’m splitting this post into two sections: my arguments against Flash from the user perspective, and my arguments against it from the designer/developer perspective. I don’t bother representing the third group, because there’s really no part of me that supports it. I have reluctantly used Flash for a few, very limited purposes in recent years1, but I am actively striving to eliminate even those rare instances of it from my work.

But enough about my work (for now). Any web designer or developer worth their hourly rate knows the user comes first.

Part one: the user’s perspective

1. Flash-based designs look bad. I know I’m not an ordinary user, given my professional background, but I can spot Flash-based content in an instant, and it’s always a turn-off. There’s just something… cheap-looking about most of it. More often than not, I notice that Flash-based content has bad text rendering (both because of kerning and leading issues and because of Adobe’s abysmal anti-aliasing technology, far surpassed by the built-in anti-aliasing of plain HTML text in modern Mac web browsers and Mac OS X itself). And beyond the text, most Flash content I see has cheesy, cookie-cutter animated effects. It’s not as objectionable as a PowerPoint presentation, but it’s almost as immediately identifiable, and equally uninspiring.

Now, it’s true I’ve seen some excellent Flash-based web design. But it’s definitely the exception, and it’s rarer as an overall percentage (or at least feels that way) than first-rate design is on non-Flash sites. Plus, since I can never entirely turn off my professional perspective, knowing the drawbacks that an all-Flash website brings, my experience even of these best examples of Flash-based design are tainted beyond redemption.

2. The most high-profile use of Flash is for ads — and annoying ones at that. OK, there’s a lot of Flash content out there that’s not ads. I’d like to believe that ads make up a minority — hopefully a small one — of all Flash content on the web. But I think most of the interesting Flash web design is never seen by most people. The only Flash-heavy content that draws a lot of traffic is either online games (some good, some… meh), kids’ interactive sites (probably the only use of Flash I unabashedly support), and promotional sites for blockbuster movies and console video games. Of course, the number one use of Flash these days is probably to watch video online, from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Funny or Die, Hulu. Flash-based video is everywhere. But that’s changing.

So, set aside the sites that require heavy-duty interactive content or (for now) video, and what are you left with? Where else does the average Internet user encounter Flash most often? Ads. Annoying, intrusive, obnoxious ads. I realize perfectly well that unless a website is actually selling stuff (including, potentially, access to the site itself, and good luck with that unless your content is either targeted at highly-specialized professions or X-rated), the only viable revenue source is advertising. But websites that operate on an ad-based business model walk a fine line: the ads need to be attention-getting enough to encourage the user to click on them, but they can’t get in the way so much that people stop visiting your site altogether. As a user, when I encounter a site with an over-abundance of intrusive ads, it’s a double negative: not only do I think the site’s design is too annoying to deal with, but I automatically assume its content must be crap, not worth wading through the ads to get to anyway.

3. It’s a plug-in. A plug-what? A what-in? This is beyond the level of most users’ interest in their computers. I just want it to work, I don’t want to fiddle around with downloading extra crap, especially when the installer was written by Adobe. (See, it’s hard for me to divorce my mind from my professional experience, even for a few minutes.) Once it’s installed, you’re done forever (or… well… until a new version of Flash comes out), so it’s easy to forget about it, but get a new computer and it’s either not installed, or you’ve purchased a PC that’s not only preloaded with Flash but 3 dozen other crappy OEM add-on applications that you’ll spend a week trying to get rid of (or, more likely, leave on your desktop gathering metaphorical dust along with 100 other icons, including every Word document you’ve ever created, forever).

The point is, despite Adobe’s efforts to make us think Flash is a natural part of the web, a sibling to HTML, CSS and JavaScript, in fact it is not a web technology at all. It’s just this proprietary thing Macromedia (now part of Adobe) developed for creating interactive media (first as Director, and then as Shockwave) and decided at some point to turn into something that could be embedded in web pages: Flash. (I’m sure the longtime Macromedia fanboys will want to correct me on some point of that history, but for anyone who doesn’t give a crap, that’s the gist of it.)

Flash filled a niche, but web standards have caught up (or are well on their way to doing so), and a proprietary add-on just isn’t necessary in the way that it used to be. And, of course, on any device running iPhone OS, it’s not even that. It’s this.

4. You can’t “deep link.” I realize that to anyone who doesn’t know what a “plug-in” is (as I joked about in the previous item), the concept of “deep linking” may cause a spontaneous mental breakdown. But just because the average user doesn’t know what “deep linking” means doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it. The best example of this (though sadly I don’t have an example of it at the moment) is the scenario of a Flash-based photo gallery. Want to send your friend a link to the 14th photo in the gallery? Too bad. If you copy and paste the URL from your browser into an email, they’re going to be taken to the first photo, or, more likely, to the obnoxious crap you didn’t bother watching when you first landed on the site, because the designer at least had the courtesy of including a “Skip Intro” button.

It’s possible now to work around some of these limitations, but in my experience most Flash-based websites don’t.

5. It’s sometimes used when it’s not really needed. This is closely related to the previous item, and is probably more of a complaint I have as a developer than as a user. But there are just some sites that don’t need Flash. Or even if they do, the whole thing doesn’t need to be in Flash. If Flash were restricted to the parts of the site that require its capabilities, and things like the main navigation and text content were in plain HTML, then deep linking and a host of related problems could be alleviated.

6. Mobile. Note that I said “mobile” and not “iPhone OS.” It’s true that Apple is the only mobile device manufacturer who is actively and aggressively keeping Flash off the platform, but up to now no other mobile device has a working, readily available version of Flash either. And even though Android 2.2 (on the Android-based devices that are actually upgradeable to it) does finally offer Flash support, the jury is still out on how usable it is. Adobe is working hard (apparently), but there are major technical hurdles in optimizing Flash both for the low processing power of mobile CPUs and for reasonable battery consumption. But even if those technical issues are resolved, there’s the interface issue. Flash simply was not designed for touchscreen devices, and even though, from what I’ve read, Adobe has added programming hooks for touchscreen input, a lot of existing Flash-based interactive content will not be usable as-is on a touchscreen device. This is an issue for “regular” web technologies too, but the open standards of HTML and JavaScript make building a mobile web browser that overcomes these differences far easier than with Flash — and Adobe doesn’t need to be at the center of the process.

7. The security and privacy settings you don’t know about, but should. There’s a reasonably good chance you’ve looked at the privacy settings in your web browser’s Preferences dialog box. But have you seen this screen before?

Probably not. But maybe you want to check it out. It’s here. You see, Flash really isn’t a part of your web browser. Flash has its own privacy settings, its own cache, its own cookies. Web sites that use Flash can store and retrieve information on your computer, completely apart from the capabilities and limitations in your web browser. And Flash can access information on your computer that the web browser by itself can’t. That’s the whole reason Flash-based file uploaders exist, and why they work better than a regular browser “upload” form field: because Flash can read information about files on your computer that is strictly off-limits, for security purposes, to HTML and JavaScript.

I’m not claiming the sky is falling or crying wolf. I don’t personally know of any major security exploits that have come out of this particular capability of Flash. But what happens if there is an exploit? There’s no one who can fix the problem but Adobe, and no alternative means for you to access Flash-based content. If Internet Explorer has a security exploit, you can always browse the web with Firefox, but despite some noble open source efforts, there really is no alternative to Flash. Adobe has an absolute monopoly on Flash-based web content.

8. Performance. Flash is notoriously much slower on the Mac than it is on Windows. Always has been, always will be. Apparently, according to none other than Steve Jobs himself, it’s also the number one reason Macs crash. I don’t doubt it, though I haven’t experienced it myself, mainly because I avoid Flash-based content as much as possible. But even though it performs well on Windows (largely due, I suspect, to more direct access to the system’s hardware — another security concern, incidentally — on Windows compared to the abstracted hardware access the Mac grants applications), it’s a resource hog everwhere else. I already talked about Flash’s performance issues on mobile devices. The upshot is that Flash seems to be pretty bloated and inefficient, and since Adobe won’t let anyone else look under the hood, I suspect there’s a good chance that it is… perhaps even more than anyone thinks.

In other words, if there’s a better way to do something, use it. Dump Flash.

Part two: the designer/developer’s perspective

1. Flash created a rift in the community. You don’t say! Just as there’s a big wall in the corporate software development world between .NET and Java, there’s a huge wall in the web design/development community between those who use Flash and those who don’t. This may stem in no small part from Adobe’s (and, previously, Macromedia’s) marketing tactics. There are almost unlimited options available for free (or at least cheap) IDEs for web and application development (or you can just use Notepad), but the only way2 to create Flash content is to pony up.

The result of this — and I speak from my own experience, which was a contributing factor in which side of the fence I fell on — is that designers who were given Adobe Creative Suite had Flash on their desktops, and developers who did not have CS were shut out. Flash, with ActionScript, became a gateway drug for designers looking to get into programming. Adobe capitalized on familiarity with their applications’ user interfaces, and a generation of Flash evangelists was born.

Or, on the other hand, you had developers or, like me, designer-developers who happened to fall just slightly more into the “developer” column, who were maybe given a copy of Photoshop, but encouraged not to use it. There have been periods over the past decade where I have been receptive to the idea of getting into Flash development, but was denied access to the necessary tools. It doesn’t take too long playing that role — in the context of all of the criticisms I’ve already levied from the user’s perspective — before you just decide it’s a piece of crap; you’re better off without it; and you’ll do everything you can to prove that standards-based alternatives are better.

The war between Apple and Adobe over Flash support on the iPhone OS has brought the situation to a head, with the Flash development community up in arms over Apple’s war (in which they are at least collateral damage, and at worst Adobe mercenaries), and the standards community cheering what they see as the overdue demise of public enemy number one.

2. Flash developers use it unnecessarily. There’s the rift in the community again. Because Flash developers were often weaned on Adobe Creative Suite and don’t know how to program in anything other than ActionScript, nor often how to build a simple web page in HTML/CSS, and because it’s easy for them to dazzle clients with a Flash-based site, it’s often tempting to just build an entire site in Flash. It looks impressive, the client thinks they’re getting what they want, and the check’s in the mail.

The problem is, although you can build an entire website in Flash doesn’t mean you should. In addition to the aforementioned mobile devices, Flash content is invisible to screen readers, meaning visually impaired users can’t access it, and, probably more important to the client’s bottom line, to search engines. As far as Google is concerned, that whiz-bang all-Flash website you just created for your client may as well not even exist.

Again, there are ways around a lot of these limitations, but I can think of a better one: just don’t use Flash.

And so on. I had a few other items on my list of complaints from the developer’s perspective, but they’re mostly facets of these same points: it’s a closed system entirely dependent upon one company; it’s expensive; it’s increasingly unnecessary as web standards evolve; it encourages bad user experience (UX) design; it distracts designers-turned-developers from learning web standards; etc.

Arguing for or against Flash is a lot like arguing politics and religion. It’s a polarizing issue. Everyone who has any interest in the debate also has investment in a particular perspective — baggage and biases they may not be fully willing to admit even to themselves, much less throw into their arguments. And a lot of it isn’t entirely rational.

As Upton Sinclair famously wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” It’s also easy to use that argument when you’re entirely convinced that it’s describing the other person’s position. I’m sure there is more behind most pro-Flash arguments than a vested interest in the ongoing potential for work developing for the platform. But from my perspective, it’s difficult to see.

Notes

1 I said there were “a few” things I’ve used Flash for in recent years. In fact, there are three: 1) YUI Uploader, on the administrative side of my CMS, for handling file uploads with a user-friendly progress bar; 2) JW Player, on a few client sites running my CMS, for displaying Flash-encoded video (FLV) in a skinnable player; and 3) sIFR, that damnable bastard Flash/JavaScript hybrid solution to the problem of customizing fonts on the web. I’m pleased to say I haven’t used sIFR in nearly two years (though, sadly, I’m still avoiding promising CSS3-based solutions like Typekit and the new Google Font API because of poor rendering on Windows, especially in Firefox). And I’ve just — temporarily, at least — pulled YUI Uploader out of my CMS after upgrading to CakePHP 1.3, due to an incompatibility I have yet to troubleshoot. As for JW Player, well, I’m still using it for now, but I’ll actively pursue HTML5 video solutions on future projects.

2 OK, owning a $700 copy of Adobe Flash isn’t the only way to create Flash content. Knock yourself out. Adobe will be standing by to take your order when you get back.