Custom ajax fonts

Krak

Hrmm.. To me, no the 1% doesnt matter, its too small of a minority to focus on. When you make something, you have a target audience and you go for it. Thats not always 100%. PCs too slow to run flash? Gimme a break, if your shit is that slow, your not surfing the web as it is. As for "other accessability functions within flash for the handicapped"...that goes with what I was saying about target audiences. If your making a site that has a large group of people that need "other accessability functions" chances are you are not using flash. And if you are, your an idiot.

the aloha

i must be missing these groovy images you are seeing.

Krak

You must be going to the wrong places.

Krak

I didnt mean to sound like a dick. I re-read my comments and it kind of sounded like it. Sorry.

tripdragon

to much mean fighting. Flash is a a:) simple to ise or b:) a pain to use. And untill Ajax stuff gets it's own gui system for creation designers will keep useing flash and love it. Ya'll 1% without flash will have to suffer cause the tools gotta be built for us to use. It is hard enough trying to cater to every single messed up "i wanna interpt css mine own way" broswer but then to shoot down flash and foruce us to us some thing called ajax that is pure code and once again hass all of the same problems with a trillion broswers crap, you can start to see why (hopefully) that we dont touch ajax yet., As for the text idea, dont worry about it, they are not all gems.

413x

@tripdragon, please choose one (and be honest): [ ] yes, I understand the concept behind the web and its standards [ ] no, I don't have a clue what I'm talking about sorry, couldn't resist because I think you just don't get it. you blind-focused groovy smoovy designers just don't get the fact, that "groovy smoovy" should be just an add-on wrapped around the information, not replacing the information. and if the "groovy smoovy" hides the important informations from the user (or a possible percentage of the users) it's just not appropriate. and please stop discriminating the disabled. and by the way. I don't think that there are just about 1% of the web-users without flash. that's purely a marketing number. based on my experiences it should be much higher, as a lot of people (temporarily) disabled flash because of the common abuse in adverts / banner "design". also not all users have the latest version of the flash plugin installed (and hey, we both know that only latest versions rule </irony>)

Minisweeper

what disabilities prevent people from viewing flash sites? o_O

413x

@minesweeper: blindness and color blindness? or are there screenreaders which can handle flash?

Krak

Well like I said earlier. If you making a site that has a large audience, or any audience for that matter, of people that use screenreaders (or have other disabilities) .... most likely your not using flash. And if you are, well..... Most flash sites I see are related to gaming, or webhosting, or graphics, personal sites, etc etc...stuff like that. Why would I make a site for retired WW2 veterans in flash? That doesnt make sense. C'mon people.

lech

@krak, pc's don't have a problem with flash, it's the other way around, other platforms have a problem with it. Primarily macs which tend to really lag and draw up huge cpu resources just to view something that's 1/4 of the screen in dimension. Also, I've had instances here on my laptop running linux which in some cases, calling up flash crashed firefox oddly enough. So out of my experience, flash seems to run best on windows. @Mini, some screen readers cannot interpret flash, ever seen flash running lynx? :D don't answer that but you'll get the idea hopefully. Also there's the inability to scale it like you can with regular browser text. It's like some of those really annoying sites that use the 5px fonts with light grey on white. Flash still has some hurdles to conquer in the usability dept otherwise they're moving slowly towards figuring things out. As an overall medium for say video and interactive media that's properly rendered, it's perfect. But no one site should rely on it. @tripdragon, dude, do you even know what AJAX really is?!

Krak

I wasnt aware of OS problems with flash... I will have to dig out the sites I did in flash and post em for you guys to see what I was talking about.

Kosmo

But either way, flash of ajax, there are places to use it and there are places not to use it, I'm just overwhelmed the idea that around 90% of people think that there has to be something done with flash or ajax or 'yourfavouritenewthinghere' just because you are catering for certain people. And, stop bashing gamers, I'm a gamer, a fucking big one too, I play in clans and I make mods and hopefully some day will be in the industry. So take a fucking clue, not all gamers are like you put them, for once, I absolutely hate flash, because it has ruined 99% of the good gaming sites, and they don't use it because gamers want it, they use it because THEY WANT TO USE IT BECAUSE IT IS PIMP FLY AND FRESH. Comprende? Most sites I see using some unnecessary bling are designer sites, and their hip portals, and I think it's great there, they don't use something that doesn't work 100% they care about how it works on every browser and how it will fuck your day if you go to their site and it crashes your computer. So what do we learn from here? If you know how to use something, then you should know the dangers and be able to weight the risks, and in most cases that translates to simple 'no', if you don't know how to use it, you'll propably use it wrong and use it everywhere. Just like the game site webmasters, they don't know how horrible it is to watch flashing ads because my browser doesn't support the latest bling and there is just no way to turn it off because they don't give a shit about if you can access something if you don't have flash enabled. And trust me, even a gamer doesn't like that.

Minisweeper

/me wonders if 87% of people know that 53% of statistics are either made up or useless. In any case we should really have a 'ranting' category to move all the threads like this into (though i guess that'd be most the board..) I think flash is fantastic used in moderation and with feasible alternatives; which is why for my new site i told my bro to use it as little as possible, but suggested it would probably be very useful for a particular feature. The sites still not done but i have a feeling i'm gonna be happy with the results. and kosmo, i think that for a large number of people, the use of something in the majority of gaming sites creates the impression that gamers like whatever it is. Because it figures that gamers have either made or requested that site how they wanted it. Stereotyping can be a dreadful thing though.

Kosmo

But I wouldn't say that gaming sites are bad, compared to some major sites that have been targetted towards hip young people, like any coca-cola site or MTV and whatnot are way worse than well, any gamingsite from the top of my head. Most parts, the navigation system and the way they present the information is pretty genius, and there are alot of sites that do it the way many news sites do it. You have to understand that the volume of information they have on their site is so enormous that it is confusing because it is packed so tightly. But about the bling, I just can't point my finger on gaming sites over some commercial youth hip movement crap.

Minisweeper

The thing is though, coca-cola and MTV are targetted, as you say, at a youth audience. Audiences who, i feel, are pretty likely to have the flash player installed or wouldnt be too bothered about installing it. And possibly audiences who need constant entertainment (us teen's have very short attention spans) with mini games and suchlike for which flash (and shockwave) are ideal. People probably just overlook the use of flash in these sites because they either dont use them, or expect it. I think the *major* gaming sites are very professionally done. But there are a shit load of 'clan' sites out there who just bash something together in flash and stick it up on freewebs or something for whatever reasons. I know because i've been there before. And its those that create a bad name.

Kosmo

Well, I just can't help but feel sad for the people who rate gamers based on what some 12 year old kids have on their clan sites. Maybe they have missed the fact that majority of gamers are close to the 25-30 year range, but hey, what ever, facts are for losers anyway.

lech

@ Krak- some platforms still respond sluggishly to flash, however it's not as bad as it used to be. Before some small dynamic flash would bring systems to a halt. @kosmo - I'm not knocking flash entirely, but for content driven sites, it's extremely unecessary. In fact, it's total over-kill and will render the sites useless. If it's for things like promotional sites (games/product/whatever) I'm fine with that. And trust me, I know a ton of "over-the-hill" HARD-CORE gamers that are obsesed with making bad flash animations or over-sized gif animations. They're aware of the target audience, and frankly many of them either don't care, or just aren't educated on the improper uses. This is where some bad design senses can spawn from but I'm not going to knock it as everyone learns somewhere. On that note, the main issues with flash is accessibility when you're creating a multi-paged site, screen readers, and generally no way to zoom the content globally within the screen. And this comes at the cost of your flash player version vs what version of flash the file was cranked out with. If anything, flash should be used VERY sparingly regardless of the target audience. As far as message boards go, it should be non-existant.

Kosmo

Again with the gamer generalization, it's like a gamer ate your baby or something. But it's ok, gamers are a HUGE part of the internet community and certainly a part that can be seen when compared to other loosely categorised group like that. But I'd go even further and say that there is a even more specific group than gamers that might fit your bill way better than a general gamer would and that is the newgrounds flashier, sure many of them are gamers, but let's say that out of gamers 2% are flashiers and rest are just regular gamers, I wouldn't bother rounding them to the gamer category anymore than I would go and say that "men are obsessed with making crappy quality flash animations." But, I'll let you have it. As for the use of flash, I agree, the less there is the better it is for all. When people notice that unnecessary things aside, they are just looking for information regardless of bling.

lech

Kosmo, lmao, I don't think you read my post entirely. I *AM* a gamer, and by no means any little gamer, I play often and I too do a little modding. However, throughout the community, I have witnessed that many gamers are also pretty skilled artists without much of a ranged focus. They're good, but they put some of those artistic talents to flash and invest heavily without weighing out the possible consequences. That was the main point I was trying to make. Don't get me wrong, I like flash as much as the next person, but when it's used badly, it's horrid in design and presentation 90% of the time. Or in many cases it shouldn't have been used at all. Not to single out gamers at all, but it's one of those groups where you see it over-used without purpose and that's what strikes me funny. Than again, flash in the hands of anyone who doesn't know jack about standards makes it a deadly weapon of browser destruction. Primarily, I HATE advertisements that use flash, especially the kind that spouts off on nothing but bullshit but not clicking.

Krak

Im not even going to touch this thread anymore.