64-bit OS and Web Browsers (handling flash content)

Rails
1

My site is going to rely on a lot of flash interactive content in
certain areas and as I’m concerned about the lack of flash in 64-bit
browsers. People can launch a 32-bit browser from their machine but
some may or may not know how to do that.

Anyone have advice for how to deal with this issue? Placing a message,
or some type of notice on the site? I’m just curious if anyone else
runs a lot of flash content on their site and whether or not they
utilize some type of notifier mechanism to let people know what they
need to do to use content.

Thanks.

2

Alpha B. wrote:

My site is going to rely on a lot of flash interactive content in
certain areas and as I’m concerned about the lack of flash in 64-bit
browsers.
[…]
Anyone have advice for how to deal with this issue?

Don’t use Flash. That sounds flip, but I mean it pretty seriously.
Most websites do not benefit from Flash, and it makes the site less
accessible – not just to 64-bit users, but also to visually impaired
users and mobile users.

You might be interested in OpenLaszlo, which is a frontend programming
environment for rich Internet apps. The cool thing about it is that it
can compile either to Flash or to HTML/JS, which makes it more
accessible to those without Flash Player.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

3

Thanks Marnen,

I’ll look into that. At the moment, my site is still pretty heavy with
flash and as it’s an interactive flash driven site, I might have to keep
it this way for this particular sports season. I don’t have enough time
to change everything around this year.

I’ll definitely look into the site you gave me.

4

I don’t think this topic is suitable for this mailing list. This is
not about the Flash Platform, but Rails!

Anyway…

Flash, when used properly, can provide a rich web experience. Of
course, many have used it for things that it is not suitable for or
that could be better developed using other web technologies. I would
never use it for a CMS, for example (even though there are flash-based
CMS frameworks/applications).

As an alternative to OpenLaszlo (I never liked it, for particular
reasons), you could try haXe, which is a language/compiler that
targets JavaScript, Flash, Neko, PHP and C++

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 11:21 PM, Alpha

5

Providing a full “fallback” site is considered good practice.
Additionally it can assist with SEO as the site can hence have a
quality semantic structure to the DOM used and then use capability
sniffing to enhance progressively to the flash site. Also, ensure you
use a URL manager to provide deep linking by altering the destination
anchor and then using javascript to notify your flash movie of the
appropriate scene for the user to be taken to.

On Jul 26, 11:47 am, Alpha B. [email protected]

6

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 26, 2009, at 8:43 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser
<[email protected]

wrote:

accessible – not just to 64-bit users, but also to visually impaired
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

In addition to what Marnen suggested, I would also recommend starting
to look at HTML5 and CSS Animation. For some cool examples, plase
take a look at the following using Safari 4:

http://webkit.org/blog-files/3d-transforms/poster-circle.html

http://webkit.org/blog-files/3d-transforms/morphing-cubes.html

Good luck,

-Conrad

7

Thanks for the replies all. I think this got a bit off topic as to what
I was asking for. I mainly posted this topic due to the fact that
Microsoft defaults 64-bit OS to use the 64-bit IE browser and the 64bit
IE browser has no support for flash at all.

Adobe issued a statement that they are trying to add something post
flash 10 to deal with this issue.

Therefore, I just wanted to know what type of “notifications” people use
in their rails projects when they want to alert a visitor to a
requirement.

If I have a requirement that needs to be met on my site, javascript,
flash, etc. what should I do to alert the visitor? I could possibly
just put some type of detection+redirect mechanism in place that renders
a notification. I could use a rails flash notification. Or, I could
put a disclaimer in certain areas of my site.

Again, Flash isn’t necessary to “browse” my site. But, it is required
for the interactive portions of my site. The head-2-head matchups I
provide are interactive flash and while the data and information is
non-flash (there is content there).

I suppose I could create images with the exact same size as the
interactive flash and do a replace when a user can’t use flash.

Maybe I answered my own question - replace the flash with (flash ||
images) depending on what the user can see using swfobject…

I’d still like to put some type of disclaimer up for certain interactive
portions - would flash notification messages be right for this? Or,
would you recommend another notification system?