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There are probably several down sides to building  a Flash site, out of which I can list those for now:

1- Download Size: Flash sites are normally larger, take longer time to load.

2- Invisible: Search engines can’t index Flash content, making it unsearchable and invisible, thus killing big amount of targeted traffic.

3- Permalinks: With Flash, you get a url to the main Flash page and have to browse from there. Perhaps there are work arounds for this, but normally, you cannot send a permalink or bookmark it.

4- Copy/Paste: Whether that’s good or bad for the publisher, I usually hate the fact I can’t copy any text. Turns out I was wrong (shows how intelligent I am in Flash). You can chose to make text selectable or not.

Bandwidth is getting faster and faster, so point #1 is becoming less of an issue. And now, with the new deal, Google & Yahoo are working closely with Adobe to make Flash sites indexable and visible from search engines, the biggest downside of invisibility is gone!. Somehow, they plan to do this “they’ll use web crawlers to play through all of a Flash website’s possible “states,” and make that content available through their search results”. And by doing that, Flash sites will become even much closer to normal HTML sites, only much richer.

Why are Google & Yahoo doing this?

1- Expansion: The amount of invisible web is very large, and Flash forms a big percentage of it. By doing so they will be adding much greater amount of content to their search results.

2- Silverlight: Thik about. Why Google & Yahoo together? Why now? Why Flash only? Microsoft have just broke Yahoo’s heart by not matching their requested price, and Google were there to hold them. From an enemy, Google all of a sudden became Yahoo’s best friend. I still remember the days Yahoo! were returning a message saying “Search using Yahoo!” if you search for the word Google. Now, they are both working closely on ad revenue sharing model, and want to send a knock out for Silverlight.

In their official blog, Google announced they have already launched a spider for indexing Flash sites, and you can soon expect to see Flash site results soon. Question is, where will the result link take me though. If it’s to the main Flash page and I have to browse my way through, it’s still annoying and users may not find eventually what they want and leave. I’m sure they’ll get to the permalink stage at the end somehow though.

I wonder if  the future of the web is all Flash. Some people claimed AJAX as a temporarily shifting phase, and I am wondering if Flash is really going to dominate, and AJAX sites are gonna look like static HTML sites today. I personally hope dynamic XHTML sites will last, and don’t really see them going anytime soon. I persoanlly like them more, and I am much more better and comfortable building them than graphics Flash ones.

So what do you think? What do you prefer?

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