Flash Still Has its Place

SERoundtable checks out a Google Group topic regarding Flash and Google’s recent announcement of its new Flash indexing capabilities.

Even though G has made some significant steps toward indexing flash, there’s plenty of opinion that *depending* on flash content to be indexed may not be the best basket to put all your eggs in.

clipped from www.seroundtable.com A new Google Groups thread takes a new look at how Google handles Flash content. In the thread Beu was able to bring back a former Googler, Bergy, to respond to some of these questions. Bergy’s general recommendation is still to avoid using Flash when possible: My advice is the same advice I’ve given for a good long while: Build your site first in HTML. Style it using CSS. If you must, do simple user interaction in Javascript. If you cannot resist, include multimedia content in Flash. However, remember that each of the standards evolved into their role for a reason, and while other technologies have fallen by the wayside, Flash fills the niche for highly interactive and multi-media experiences on the web. Don’t use it for something when there’s already a standard whose output can be easily parsed, easily processed, and whose openness makes its processing easier for browsers and searchbots.