Flash’s Weaknesses: Then and Now

Back in 2003 Mark Angeletti wrote an article for Sitepoint titled Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?, in which he examined the strengths and weaknesses of Flash. Mark closed his article by suggesting that in the future Macromedia had the opportunity to fix Flash’s weaknesses, and would likely do so. I thought it would be interesting to look at how much progress has been made in the past four years, and see if those weaknesses have indeed been addressed, or if there is still work to be done.

The humble breadcrumb

Hansel and Gretel

Recently I designed a site that had two navigation menus: a global navigation bar and a breadcrumb trail. It was the first time I had ever used breadcrumbs as the only form of secondary navigation, and it got me thinking about this humble form of website navigation.

When spacer gifs go bad

It’s a while since I gave any thought to spacer gifs, but I was looking at the Exxon website tonight (as you do on a Tuesday evening) and saw something that made me chuckle. I was viewing the site in Firefox (of course), and noticed that on many pages the text “spacer.gif” appeared prominently within the layout.

Exxon spacer gif screenshot

CSS Advisor

CSS Advisor is a newish community website from Adobe. On CSS Advisor users can post their own CSS tips, or pose questions which other community members can attempt to answer. This question/solution format promises that CSS Advisor will remain more focused than the average forum, and provide a practical resource to call upon when faced with a sticky CSS issue. Within a few minutes on the site I discovered a potential solution to a long time CSS bugbear of mine – Safari’s ‘Wmode flicker’ when DHTML dropdown menus are displayed over a Flash movie.

Microsoft drop the ball with Outlook 2007

Well it looks as if Microsoft has screwed up royally with Outlook 2007, at least insofar as the way HTML emails are rendered. Instead of using the not-too-shabby Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine to display HTML emails, Microsoft opted to use a customized version of the Word 2007 rendering engine. That’s right, from now on your beautifully constructed HTML newsletters are going to be rendered by the crime against layout known as Microsoft Word. That fact alone was enough to send shivers down my spine, but when I dug a little deeper I discovered just how dire the situation really is.

Firebug

So I’m back from my Christmas break, two weeks spent on a whirlwind “tour” of New Zealand catching up with family. It was a blast as always, but god damn it was cold for this time of year! I’m back in sunny Melbourne again and slowly easing back into work mode, and I’ll kick my blogging year off nice and easy with a review of Firebug which I ran out of time to finish before my holiday.

Firebug logo

Elastic Flash with scrollbars

In the past couple of years it has been common for Flash developers to design elastic sites, rather than sites with fixed dimensions. These elastic sites fill the browser window, and content is positioned programatically on the stage according to the size of the viewport. The trouble with this approach is that because the width and height of the embedded Flash swf are set to 100%, the browser will never display scrollbars. If the user sizes their browser window too small then content will begin to disappear off screen. Due to the lack of scrollbars, this hidden content is inaccessible to the user.

By writing a small JavaScript function that is triggered when the window is resized, we can overcome this restriction. When the window size is detected to be smaller than a minimum width/height specified by the designer, the Flash movie will stop scaling, and scrollbars will be forced to appear.

Virtual PC for IE6 testing

In a recent post on the Microsoft Internet Explorer blog, Pete LePage announced that Microsoft have released a Virtual PC 2004 image that includes Windows XP SP2, Internet Explorer 6, and the Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Kit. Here’s the kicker: you don’t have to buy an additional Windows license, which was previously the case when running Windows under VPC.

Securing PHP Contact Forms

One of the great benefits of PHP is that it is quick and easy for non-programmers to learn the basics of the language and begin to add server-side logic to their websites. This simplicity is a double edged sword, as many novice programmers are unaware of PHP’s security vulnerabilities and inadvertently create web applications that are an easy target for hackers and spammers. Most PHP security holes are well documented, but a newer and lesser known vulnerability is header injection, a cunning exploit whereby a spammer hijacks a website’s contact form and uses it to send bulk unsolicited email.

Fixing PNG Gamma

A recent article by Kevin Yank in the Sitepoint Tech Times newsletter drew my attention to TweakPNG, a handy tool that can correct the age old problem of PNG color shift in Internet Explorer.