Flash critic to coach Macromedia
Macromedia plans to announce a partnership Monday with Jakob Nielsen, a leading Web design guru and one of the most prominent critics of the company's Flash software for Web animation.
The arrangement marks another turning point in Macromedia's efforts to expand the role of Flash, once used mainly for colorful but essentially useless graphics tricks. The company is promoting the new version of the software, Flash MX, as the basis for delivering Web applications that make sites more useful and easier to navigate.
Nielsen, whose objections to Flash were most directly stated in his essay "Flash: 99% Bad," argued that Flash-based multimedia typically makes Web sites harder to navigate and distracts from the site's real message.
"About 99 percent of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease," he wrote two years ago.
[News.Com]
It's about time. My designer friends hate me when I say that Flash sucks. It sucks because it unleashes one of the worst viruses in the the web design industry...form over substance. Flash has launched a million horrid sites that can't be navigated, or searched. It nice to see Macromedia step up to this. Sadly though it will only be of partial help, since bad design is hard to unlearn...mj
7:28:42 AM 
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