I work a lot in Flash, and although I am sadly still limited to working in Actionscript 2 I find that I am getting better and better at doing the most interesting things.
I blame most of this late-blooming improvement to my ability on modding transcendence, believe it or not. You would be rather surprised at the similarities between AS2 and Transcendence style LISP. No, seriously.
Tonight I am ranting and raving about having found an awesome new way to deal with delivering controlled and dynamic layouts for webpages.
Ever notice how so much of the web is either static and set to some 800 wide standard (which looks puny and ridiculous on my widescreen monitor) or attempting some kind of liquid layout, which can quickly fall apart and build horrific overlaps on pages. Not much of an answer has presented itself- which is why I like to build in Flash- it offers a lot of control and scaling and all that jazz (as long as you are totally willing to sacrifice SEO). Yet, flash scaling can destroy a great design, and a lot of business shy away from it due to the problems of bandwidth, bad animation, and the aforementioned SEO problem.
Now, just last month Adobe finally released a sort of fix for this problem and Google and other got a special flash player to search flash sites. Although a promising step in the right direction, their lovely new toy doesn't manage to get past the first frame of a flash movie and can't handle anything dynamic at all.
Now that I kinda gave a crash course in the pitfalls of web design in flash- let's move on to why I am so excited- tonight I found a slick way to intelligently place content with flash (that can be read by the GoogleFlashBot) in those huge blank spaces of valuable web page real estate. Yay!
The coolest part of the trick is that the primary content and page structure can still be done in CSS and rendered in HTML- so the accessibility isn't sacrificed to make full pages at widescreen resolutions. Doesn't that just sound (well, probably boring to most of you) great!
I am going to implement my idea on my little art project site (homepage button found below) so that we all can be some of the very first people to enjoy my new hybrid layout scheme. And I will make the links to all my older mods available there, too. Yay!
Coolest yet, with this layout framework I may even have somewhat of a monopoly on the design for a while (yeah, like maybe as much as 20 minutes!)- I have searched and searched for a comparable answer (before just making my own) and nothing seems to touch on the control that I am getting with this latest trick. For instance, although a lot of sites will add content for a liquid page with flash in a similar fashion- they seem to fail the SEO requirements, and are stuck in an overbuilt all flash framework. So they may get a similar effect, but that doesn't meet the standards that most businesses have for accessibility and SEO.
I will restrain myself going into all the little details for you, just got all excited and had to share that.. not sure why I do these types of things here, except that I seem to hang out here trolling old posts for good mod ideas a lot.
Can I just share my excitement (!!!)
-
Periculi
- Fleet Officer
- Posts: 1282
- Joined: Sat Oct 13, 2007 7:48 pm
- Location: Necroposting in a forum near you
What resolution are you running at? It's supposed to be 14 point- maybe that is a little small. I have yet to update that site for what I have in mind, anyhow. You are looking at a WIP there, which sadly hasn't seen enough progress yet. 
Give it a week and check again.It's not a patentable idea- however, it may be rather marketable and if I keep the methods in-house for as long as possible, then I can hopefully use the idea to get some great jobs before template monster sites steal the idea and mass produce it for $25 a template.
