Simon Willison’s Weblog

Flash: Leave my text alone!

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? Flash is fine for graphics, animation and even some user interfaces (provided they don’t involve too much text) but please, please keep it away from anything I want to read.

This is Flash: Leave my text alone! by Simon Willison, posted on 17th July 2002.

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6 comments

  1. Halleluiah, brother! My thoughts exactly. The scary thing is, I'm sure some sites use Flash *specifically* for the reason of making their text inaccessible. Disgusting.

    Adrian - 17th July 2002 20:51 - #

  2. Aha! The first even partially unresearched comment I have seen on here Mr. Skunkeh! (Not that my blog would be anywhere as near as good if i had one, but still, couldn't resist :P) Flash MX supports full text highlighting and copying :) Try it! Not sure about search engines tho. And to be fair, as Flash is a binary file its still not spidered by search engines (but who knows, with Google caching a large variety of files nowadays, maybe its just a matter of time). I say bring on SVG.

    Elmo - 17th July 2002 22:47 - #

  3. I still can't search it though, and more importantly I can't right click it to bring up my friendly context menu with "Search the web for X" or whatever. If I'm going to read text on the web I want it in nice, accessible HTML and there's not much that's likely to change my mind. I'm not anti flash, but I /am/ anti text-in-flash - at least for anything longer than a sentence or two. Good to know you've been reading at any rate ;)

    Simon - 17th July 2002 22:53 - #

  4. yeah, flash works differetly - i think that's the underlying grudge i've got with it - it's a different world html might be good or bad but it's what people are used to because that's what the www is - they get to know it's idiosyncrasies - they know if they do this, this happens - and if you don't spend your entire life on a computer that's plenty to be getting on with for people

    john - 18th July 2002 11:22 - #

  5. SVG is a good call. Having looked at the VML stuff in IE, I imagine that SVG will be nearly as powerful (no, I haven't installed the Adobe plugin, I hate plugins, why do you ask? ;-)) and I can't see a lot that you can do in Flash that you can't do with SVG and Javascript. Maybe Flash will just go away. Or, better still, someone will write a Flash to HTML/JS/SVG converter.

    sil - 18th July 2002 15:03 - #

  6. Maybe the only correct observation that I have seen in this blog. Most probably because it doesn't involve Microsoft. This is an observation I made long time ago. Flash sucks on text and that's why it is going to fail as a application platform.

    Serge - 29th January 2004 23:36 - #

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