Today, incidentally before to read your article, I have been browsing over 200 sites in the Spanish Web, a very rich and creative place, regarding the dynamic of web design.

The  research was focusing at the industrial equipment field.

It result of this experience, that 20% of my research and/or my life time, were lost, obliged, forced, to be stuffed with flashing shows.

To get event with the flashit stuffers, I opted to loose an extra time to write about my feeling.

An why not to try to get the article published in some buzz Eziner newsletters to  advertise a absolutely not Buzz oriented project like the Freewwwcitizen construction site. 

 Anyone surfing the web for scientific or business purpose are hunting for reliable and easy to get information. 

Scripts Flash and all the Flashing dynamic paraphernalia, are finally very repulsive for someone, looking for the information content over bullshit, excepted the pop up information rich windows.  

Not to say that it is impossible to copy a gif embedded text, a gif banner or a button looks better , I agree, but  if you save the page in a folder in HTML, eventually you will loose 90% of the information, including the URL to return to Site. 

Some designer go to the limit of the acceptable professional stupidity, obliging the visitor to click blindly over all over the screen, to found an "Enter" link!  
Very few "artistes"  have the decency to offer a non flash option.

Personally I do love small font and dark color nuances, and a graphic composition look  great with bleu  or dark teal small  8 font over a black background.
The only trouble,  it is eventually an unreadable text in day light, and there is any hope to block the text, of to change the browser font size! 

To wait 2 minutes to get a ZERO  information content and later be stuffed with 3 pages of flashing gif, not  finishing  to download, is not a realistic and effective sort of marketing communication. 

Most Internet connection works in reality, at only 10%<30% of the nominal value that the IPS expect us to believe. In Mexico, we do enjoy of a lucky day, getting a 5% ratio from the Prodigy-Telmex, official 46 kBd!
 
 What do you think?  

I have been involved in the early seventies with the pioneers of the modern marketing communication revolution in France. 
Flash method like were invented at that time, using multiple slide projectors, movie, sound synchronization, all the B.S, computer driven, back in 1972. 
It was call the Audio-visual revolution.

That was fine to excite the members of the board to buy the advanced art productions.
However It was very frustrating to compare the effective result, of the obsolete American advertising graphic, versus the poor score, of the most advanced European graphic creativity. 
 
Ok, over 30 % of the Americans are illiterate, or functionally illiterate like the citizens, in most of the developed countries.
Those potential customers could be eventually happiest with flashits & battery sounds. 

However, 70 % of the population is not obviously handicapped.
In the last 12 months period, the flash tide, reveal a total ignorance from too many Web designers, regarding the most basic psycho communication knowledge .

To have to spend one or two minutes, to read less than 10 words is pushing the 70% of visitors into the deep subnormal category. 

The last 30 years of TV spot communication teaching  experiences remain an essential audio-visual knowledge. 
In 20 second you have to upload to the visitor mind the content of 50 pages of screen play including non verbal and sophisticated psycho-associative images and semantic   communication, the Web flashers are obviously getting so far, short, showing a logo and three buttons for 100 seconds!     

Hard to be taxed as an conservative mind if you check my background and projects.

Not to mention, that I am a trained graphic artist, an Art connoisseur and an over average creative person with  a natural passion for the images media particular 3D aptitude.
 So, this is not an artistic frustration that motive the caricatured criticisms of the present Flash fashion, but 30 years of particular interest for the evolution of the media communications. 

All considered, I have to admit that I feel much happy to meet with the typical white Time new roman page and bleu default hyperlink font of the university paper style, than with a megaton of flashit of vain corporate logo's pages.

An other Flashit limitation it is the small frame display, that don't allows the psycho virtual impression of space continuity eventually created by scrolling a pages, particularly including 3D optic references    

An alternative could be to offer a Flashing Art show to the visitor, for his esthetic enjoyment  in a concept like the  "take an Art Break" that I am testing to promote in my pages, also video spots, embed in the basic html page could work.
Time differed image loading , including in the background are not  generally applied

An artistic Flash show could be loaded in cache during the four of five minutes of consistent information's gathering, allowing a great final result. 

To enjoy a multimedia shows is great, if the artist is talented and that will create a new sort of advertising and motivation to visit a site.     

I do feel a particular passion for the Web frontier, I have been first an intensive surfer-reader before to get into the hard Webmaster, mastering experience.

 
During the last three years I had spent some 6000 hours making different researches in the Web to prepare the http://freewwwcitizen.freewwwtools.org/ project including  http://freewwwtools.org a genuine user Freeware selection conceived as a promotional  "vector" for the absolutely not buzz oriented aim, of cooperating to the divulge of the alternative thinking and technologies. 

Amitiés

  Gerard 

 PS. It is much easier to write in French, you bet!  English is my third language; will you please excuse the eventuality of grammatical confusion with other languages.