Derleek Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 What do you guys to animate elements of a website? -Flash or Javscript? I am looking at some examples of what Mootools has to offer as far as pure aesthetics and i'm really pretty impressed. Although there do seem to be some glitchy ones that use much more advanced techniques (ex: kind of jittery/shaky). Why not just use flash to make the animations? I mean does using flash limit your audience (by users not having flashplayer installed or large download times for users withs low internet?). That is the main reason I can come up with for not using flash, besides its kinda just a pain in my ass. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonLewis Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Not everyone has javascript. I didn't know you could animate with javascript, I'm confused. I'd say flash because flash would be far more powerful in the animation standard. It probably will limit the users though, especially with the slow internet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derleek Posted September 8, 2008 Author Share Posted September 8, 2008 yeah, check out mootools You can do lots of stuff with JS. [ur=jquery.coml]Jquery[/url] is another Javascript famework that is pretty popular it seems. I personally am going at mootools. anywho. It seems like for certian things Flash is definitely better (ad's and other more intensive animations) while mootools/jquery provide some neat tools for content display. Morphing styles with Javascript is fun =) As for the limitations, i read that only about 5% of internet users do not have javascript, I have yet to find a statistic if flash is more/less common. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonLewis Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Here are some Flash statistics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fadion Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 I guess that limitations are so minor that one shouldn't bother considering. The only thing is the Flash version, which in many computers may not be the latest. Even though, one can export for an older version, or run some detection. As for the technology contrasts, they are really different ones. Once upon a time when JavaScript was evil, Flash was the (only) choice for an interactive and cool looking website. There were problems to it, filesize (as designers wanted to unleash all its potential, will complex animations and videos), search engine visibility (only recently google came up with an algorithm to track flash pages) and accessibility. But those times are gone and JavaScript can now days be used with confidence. It doesn't provide the flexibility and animation power that flash does, but who needs that for regular websites. Surely, that doesn't mean that flash is dead and companies like 2advanced demonstrate it. Just that in my opinion, flash is more suitable for ads, demos and anything related that needs good presentation. Otherwise, for simple animations (or even none), JavaScript is a good and simple choice. I've been working a bit on mootools when I discovered these JavaScript libraries, but i've found Prototype and Script.aculo.us to be better and simpler. Plus adding that they are a lot better supported. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derleek Posted September 8, 2008 Author Share Posted September 8, 2008 the 99% doesn't mean a lot when it takes someone with crappy internet 15 minutes to download a web-page (although dial-up is becoming less common these days). There are many things that make developing a site ENTIRELY in flash a bad idea. minor issues such as compatibility may not be that big of a deal any more, but a site developed in flash can get out of hand easy and really distract from the information trying to be displayed. ex: breaking bad It is never good to have your users search for the content. (i wanted to find the ace of cakes website but i don't have time to dig up that piece of junk). How good is google's support for search engine visibillity of Flash? I completely agree with guiltygear, flash has its place in the web-design world. But for the average site javascript animation is a great way to avoid the downsides. I was just really wondering where web-designers stand on grounds of animation development. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel0 Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Which language is better? Spanish or French? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
448191 Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Which do you prefer: a rash on the balls or an itch on the arse? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
obsidian Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 I have had to deal with this exact topic for the last several months at work. There are two schools of thought on the matter, and they have both been touched on here already, so I won't get into depth with it. In my mind, it comes down to this: if the content of the animation can be left entirely out of the DOM and therefore out of SEO content, use flash. However, if you are writing up an animation for content that needs to be available to spiders as part of the DOM, flash obviously will not work, and you need to use JavaScript to the best of your ability. That being said, there are some points where (in my opinion) one or the other should always win out. If you are doing a simple image rotation or animation (gallery or whatever), flash should really be the poison of choice... even for dynamically loaded galleries - just use XML for your data set. On the other hand, if you have to have physical text/content that needs to be markup within the animation, your obvious choice will be JavaScript (at least until Flash fully supports CSS). If you do not use JavaScript for this type of layout, you will end up having to implement Flex and some other things that can be quite overkill for simply animating a content block. Now, on the topic of tools, I have to agree that mootools has some interesting effects, but it is a bloated toolset when compared to some of the other libraries available. I would definitely recommend jQuery for 99% of the client side coding that needs to be done. It is light enough for you to create your own objects and animate stuff however you see fit. Check out the animate method that can so easily be implemented into your code base. In addition, the jQuery object has a fadeIn() and fadeOut() method that allow for that type of animation as well. All in all, this is by far the best tool out there for lightweight performance boosters. I just finished publishing a Slideshow component into our company's internal CMS that implements jQuery to allow for fully customized animation between dynamic content blocks within a page. Including full JSDoc documnetation, the entire JavaScript file is only about 400 lines long... I love jQuery Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derleek Posted September 8, 2008 Author Share Posted September 8, 2008 Which do you prefer: a rash on the balls or an itch on the arse? -definitely an itch on the arse... LOL thanks obsidian. I will make an effort to check out Jquery. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liquid Fire Posted September 9, 2008 Share Posted September 9, 2008 I am a fan of javascript over flash, more over a fan of jQuery, but that does not mean flash dos not have its place. For instance: http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/ : the top part of the website would have to be flash and could not be done in javascript(i don't think), but the below that did not have to be done in flash. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liquid Fire Posted September 9, 2008 Share Posted September 9, 2008 Also another thing to note is that when i have a normal website and do nothing, FF uses like 0-5% cpu but a website in all flash like diablo3.com uses 25-35% when idle. Now generally CPU in not a big issue but just another this the flash requires more off(a page like http://www.extjs.com/deploy/dev/docs/ all if javascript requires 20-30% cpu on load but after is goes down to 0-5%). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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