Floating DIVs
November 29th, 2006 . by polyGeekI read a lot of developer blogs and one of the themes I run across the most from the Ajax crowd is their top reasons I hate Flash lists. It’s almost always: not open source, not indexable by search engines, requires plugin, and use for obtrusive advertisements.
I’ll grant that they have a decent, not great, case for each of these except for the last one. On that one I’m going to have to say that it is their technology that is creating most of the annoying adds on webpages today. I see so many of those floating DIVs animating across my browser page that I want to disable JavaScript. Of course I don’t because I’d be shooting myself in the foot.
To be fair most of the annoying adds on webpages today are simply animated GIFs which have been around for ages. After that we get those stinking floating DIVs that seem to be everywhere. And occasionally we get a floating Flash movie that gets in the way of what we’re trying to do.
At least the Flash ads are usually entertaining and attractive instead of the crappy looking DIVs. It’s a small consolation.
If you’re an Ajax Developer with your own top reasons to hate Flash then remove annoying ads from your list or at least add a note that floating DIVs are just as annoying and way more numerous.
I couldnt’ agree more, i always that was a bit weird. To be honest its never the fault of technology. That is like saying if you removed Flash (or Javascript) that advertising would go away, of course not, people would just find some other disruptive and annoying way to show advertising, like those sites where you have to go through a page of advertising to get to the content … how annoying is that and thats just HTML!
After all there are adverts on television and in the cinema but nobody says get rid of the television or movie theatres.
You speak the truth my friend.
You know what adverts I hate the most are those simple little GIF banner/tower adds that jump around. It’s almost impossible to read something when some GIF is about to throw me into an epileptic seizure. Fortunately FireFox has an extension that lets you get rid of those things.
I agree. there have been times I’ve had to hold up a piece of paper to cover those kinds of ads to be able to read something in peace.
I do think for most people, Flash has come a long way past the public perception as “just for cartoony ads”. As in, most people don’t cringe so much when you mention Flash these days.
Very true, actually people have begun to tolerate web advertising in general a lot more. Its really everywhere you go. i sometimes wish there were better ways of generating revenues, but I suppose its just such a simple thing to do. Every few weeks I feel a temptation to add some advertising to FlashDen and then i recoil at the idea of spoiling our nice, clean homepage with ads.
What I think is the best type of advertising is the type that you actually WANT to read, like the job adverts on 37signals’ SvN blog, those are adverts with some useful value!
Anyhow, enough of me ranting!
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