Boy, did I not expect to see this when I woke up this morning…

Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog

“We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.”

After reading into the subject it seems that Google have been working alongside Adobe to come up with a new Flash indexing algorithm. Ever since Adobe acquired Macromedia it seems that they’ve been dead set on promoting and improving their leading products to ensure that they continue to improve and play vital roles in online usage.

As a Web Designer/Developer it leads me to worry immensly about how they will shape the future of the business and whether clients will now want all their websites to be created in Flash. I’m sure you could all name a thousand reasons as to why using Flash for a website is a bad thing, but recent developments with Flash have caused us to rethink our strategies on the most popular browser plug-in of all time.

The Internet as it is hasn’t changed a lot over the years. In fact, it’s barely changed at all! Whilst the Internet has sat there doing nothing Flash has moved leaps and bounds every year, and now with Google deeming text in Flash to be crawlable we have to realise that Flash is an attractive prospect to many. Whilst we’ve all been complaining Adobe have found ways around the many problems we face with Flash websites today. Flash is now bookmarkable as SWF files can act based on URL’s, Flash is likely to become somewhat accessible in the future, if not through an XML file feeding content into the Flash file, and Flash works on the majority of platforms, aside from mobile devices.

So we’ve come to the conclusion that Flash does work for websites, right?

Wrong.

As a tool Flash allows for a lot of control over user interface, leaving this in the hands of the designer/developer. Creating a website in Flash is completely different to creating a website in HTML/CSS, with the former requiring a lot more design/artistic flair to accomplish a workable UI. Since a lot of Flash designers aren’t UI experts a large amount of full-Flash websites are close to unusable for the average person. As the skill-set for an experienced Flash developer is more extensive than an experienced web designer there will always be a tiny group of well-made Flash websites against a sea of terrible ones.

In many ways, Flash and AJAX are very similar. Both are very annoying, useless on average handheld devices, and used in ways they shouldn’t be.

One real worry I have with this new development is the level of abuse that Google may suffer. Due to the dynamic nature of Flash and it’s newly-found crawlability perhaps we’re not far off from black-hat SEO analysts deciding to stuff Flash files with invisible or pre-loading text; any excuse to get their precious websites up a few ranks and to cash in on the success of fooling search engines.

As much as I do not like websites completely created in Flash I cannot claim to be a part of the war. I do believe Flash has its place, and there are times when a full-Flash website may be reasonable for a business. Whilst I wish to stay on the sidelines the war is about to kick off again between the Flash Developers and the Web Developers. We’ll just have to see how well Google picks up text in Flash to see how this war pans out, but do expect the usual amount of lies, tears and tantrums from both sides as they duke it out to see who is the best at making websites.