Simon Willison: “Moment of realisation: I just figured out what it is about Flash that bugs me so much. Flash is rubbish at text. Sure it can render text in pretty ways, but it never feels like real words. Flash takes good old fashioned text and locks it away in a pretty but shallow world, one that is out of reach of search engines, screen readers and my all important right mouse button. What good is text is text if I can’t search it, select it, copy it, paste it and generally processs it in whatever way I see fit?”
You’re absolutely right. I was thinking about that the other day.
Me too. But Macromedia must know this. Can’t you at least embed a flash file into an HTML page that has metatags, so it’s more spiderable/indexable?
And copying text isn’t an impossibility with vector text, right? Seems like the same thing that PDF does.
Reconciling our HTML page model with the richness of other media will be a big issue as we combine the Internet with traditional multimedia; it’s not just a Flash issue.