A reason to develop flash websites ?

Posted: 18:00 July 1, 2008
Web Development |

So Google learns to crawl flash today …

Of course my first thoughts were of flash the superhero with google crawling all over him. Why … God alone knows but I’ve been drinking red bull again today so thats probably why

You can read more on googles blogspot http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html

If you look through the dev section on Adobe as well you can find the newly ? released spec.

Now this doesn’t mention how useful being able to index a flash site will be. Sure it’ll find links to other pages but a lot of the sites I’ve seen are complete flash sites ? I guess this does open up a world of possibilities for those wanting to do shiny things with their menus.

Will these menus be accessible ? will CTRL+ work for the visually impared … will screen readers be able to read the menus hmm.. not so sure about that just yet but maybe with time we’ll see some interesting changes to websites ?

edit: The specs are here for SWF file format

Comments

3 Responses to “A reason to develop flash websites ?”

James on July 2nd, 2008 12:52 pm

And now I see word of it has broken over on IWF http://www.irishwebmasterforum.com/search-engine-optimisation/6260-flash-now-searchible-by-google-yahoo.html
paul on July 3rd, 2008 7:52 pm

as far as I know , search engines like google, could index flash files for quite a bit. But they were not good at following navigation on them and sometimes got stuck on all flash sites, and often they didn’t list all the pages.

p
James on July 3rd, 2008 8:03 pm

I’d have thought they could see the content of them to a certain degree but how could it deal with links in the flash file where its told to jump to frame 200 and stop … I’m curious as to how it’ll work indexing them though now. I guess we’ll start to see the impact in the next month or two. I’d still think you’d really need some kinda sitemap of the flash file to tell it just where everything is in it.