Three years ago, I would have rejoiced at the thought that using Flash was a viable format for serving my content to web users. All my woes of content propagation would have been solved, and in a beautifully animated venue; a tribute to form and function… or so I would like to think.

Although, if Flash hadn’t been somewhat non-internet savvy, my love for Web 2.0 and standards compliant
websites would never have become what it is today. So for that, I thank you Macromedia for not thinking about your Google users, your Yahoo! users, and all those other search users out there. At least not for the first 11 years.

So, in case you haven’t heard yet, Adobe, Yahoo!, and Google have teamed up to make Flash ‘search friendly.’ However, despite this seemingly good news, Flash is still not a viable medium for content delivery. And here’s why:

Text Heirarchy

The main difference with the new ’searchable’ Flash is search engines ability to read text within SWFs. Even though the the text is readable, it essentially becomes a big pile of words with no greater weight given to bolded text or headers.

Dynamic content

The same problem arises with true AJAX as well- the content changes, but the URL doesn’t. This causes a problem for search engines indexing content as well as the ability to track user’s interactions with these different bits of content (that is, unless you are lucky enough to get into the Google Analytics - Event Tracking beta)

Flash Crawling is Still Proprietary

Even though the situation has improved, there is no ’see if my Flash is easily readable’ button to check how well you did optimizing your new Flash site. Flash still doesn’t earn external links like HTML does, and a large portion of Flash isn’t even readable anyway.

So i stand by my Flash mantra- Flash is one of the greatest tools in a web designer’s bag as long as your users can find your site.