At some point, I would have advocated the abolishment of Flash forever solely due to the grievances inflicted upon the Internet by its users. However, I’ve seen some great applications recently, and I have to admit that I enjoy a good Flash game sometimes.

Just think of a world without YouTube and its ilk, too! Speaking of which, I hear good things about BigThink ( http://bigthink.com )

In particular, I mean when people construct packages that load a new page every time the user views a new image. This is a sleazy method for inflating page views — but at the expense of the user experience. Sending that server request for each click is a waste of bandwidth.

Flash can be employed to make a user experience more seamless, faster, smoother. It’s quite a pity when people bypass that benefit in favor of something clunky.

Flash is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it does come with a bunch of disadvantages that are harmful to usability, accessibility, findability, bloggability, editability, interoperability, search (and thus traffic), etc. Yes, there are workarounds for most of these, but not without jumping through a lot of hoops.

To me, this is not so much a design question as a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. And there are a lot of factors in deciding what’s the right tool for the job.

It’s also not a question of code vs. WYSIWYG - more sophisticated Flash presentations still require ActionScript, and less complicated HTML presentations can be done in Dreamweaver or similar without touching any code. If you’re using a templating system in either Flash or Dreamweaver, the process can be made easy enough for journalists without a lot of tech experience to accomplish.

The key is to recognize what in a planned UI can only be done in Flash, and to limit the Flash usage to just those elements. What can be done with standard technologies (i.e. not Flash) should be done in with standard technologies.

While this seems like a pretty clear-cut rule of thumb, it’s not always so straightforward, as some visual designs don’t lend themselves to being broken up into Flash and non-Flash elements. But visual designs that do lend themselves to being segmented should be segmented.

Publications have so much to gain by minimizing their Flash usage. It’s a shame to see so many multimedia packages being presented in 100% Flash when they really only need to be maybe 20% Flash.

On the other hand, there are the problems that non-Flash sites present when working with existing content management systems. Some publication sites may be amenable to loading up custom mini-sites to live alongside their regular content, others may not. For those that are not, a self-contained .swf upload may be the only option.

On the other hand, some pubs that are capable of uploading custom mini-sites may tell their editors that they’re not, for a host of reasons. That’s an area where editors, EICs, and IT staff really need to be educated on the benefits of keeping Flash usage to a minimum.

Because of the infinite variety of story presentation ideas and CMSs, there are no hard and fast rules we can give out - only pointers and guidelines.

(These comments are my own and don’t necessarily represent the opinion of the Berkeley J-School as a whole).

A case I’m trying to make in our newsroom is for Flash to be used in components - widgetizing, if I can overuse a word - rather than in big clunky presentations. I think it’s great to have a nice Flash interface to embed a huge number of photos with a story - maybe more than your CMS normally handles well. I think having a good Flash presentation for playing audio files is nice. Even a module in which Flash is used to do a better job with interactive mapping than I can do with JS - sure.

But where I get a little worked up, and what I’m surprised I didn’t see more comments on, is when everyone wants to put the story text inside this big square Flash… THING. What about searchability? We did mention the lack of copy-and-pastability, which is another drawback. But no one can find the stuff once it’s off our home page, even though search has been a good facet of our site.

It also makes it hard to update, as was mentioned above - not just to make changes, but to add another “installment” or another story on a related topic. Text CMS is evolving, and we are getting better and better at knowing how to make it work. Why not let it do what it does best and let Flash be a design element - not a CMS?

I feel like many times multimedia packages tend to try to force other media paradigms into the world of hypertext. While soundslides is a perfect example of a medium suited to the web, wrapping your entire multimedia presentation in a flash body.. well, not so much.

Going all flash also tends to make the powerful broadcasting extensibility of semantic media a lot harder to take advantage of. How many flash packages are reaching a wider audience through XML syndication, for example? That may not be your media package’s purpose, but regardless, making good use of web standards gives you a more flexible foundation to work with.

Sometimes we just want a bunch of data — say I’m trying to learn why my property taxes are being increased.

The journalism that changes the world, though, is usually in the form of a narrative. This is not at all strange, because from the earliest days of human communities, we told stories to help one another understand the world and how to live in it.