I knew it! “The Aussie female guide voice on your Garmin is as attractive as you’ve always hoped” http://ping.fm/fDlwj
Thoughts on mobile-first webdev and Flash
The other day I was walking near my house and thinking about mobile web development when I came upon some new condos that were just finished. The condo developer was advertising his newly available real estate with a sign featuring the development’s web address. My interest piqued, I whipped out my phone and navigated to the site, excited to see inside these modern beauties. Instead I saw this:
The condo developer commissioned a web developer to create a shiny new website to compliment the shiny new buildings. For this the web developer chose a site consisting of one big Flash object. Unfortunately neither developer thought about how Joe San Franciscan (me in this case) would be likely to interact with said website.
Let’s transition for a second to a post that I’ve been rolling around in my mind, a tutorial I read the other day, Flexible, Mobile-First Layouts with CSS3 by Brant Steen. To start off the tutorial Steen references an Engadget article, which in turn cites a Gartner study forecasting the prevalence of internet-enabled mobile devices in the near future. The study predicts that by 2013 there will be 1.83+ billion mobile devices capable of accessing the internet, which will outnumber personal computers. Even more significant, by 2015 these mobile browsers will be the primary way that the majority of people on the planet access the internet.
Steen uses these figures to support his argument that web developers should get wise to this trend and start designing their web projects mobile-first. That is, test against the most popular mobile browsers and screen resolutions and make sure the experience is optimized for this environment. As Steen points out, if your design works on a mobile screen it will almost certainly work in a full-size, desktop environment. However, the inverse is rarely true.
So back to the condo website, what really miffs me is this: being a physical structure in the non-virtual world, the new condo building is encountered most often by people walking, riding, or driving by, who might see the large posted sign and be generally interested in taking a closer virtual look. Like me, they will open the site on their phones and, unless they happen to be among the tiniest margin of people with flash-enabled mobile devices, will be greeted by a big nothing.
Now, in response to my rant another web developer pointed out to me, “But Brad, your phone will be getting Flash support pretty soon.” This is missing the point. Flash was very aptly named as it provided a way to add some sparkle, some pizzaz, a little shiny shiny to the drab turn-of-the-century web. Flash will forever be appreciated for bringing rich media to the web in a big way. And, to be sure, Adobe is doing all they can to bring the status quo that they enjoy from the desktop to the mobile environment. But Flash is not the web and Flash is not what the web should be. Flash is not open. Flash is not standard. Flash is not accessible. Flash is not the answer.
Let’s get ethereal and close this out. A bright HTML5/CSS3 future of standards-compliant, rich web applications looms on the horizon, and the future will be mobile.
