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My boss has asked me to create the technical requirements for a design consultancy who are going to be tasked with creating a demo of our website.

To be honest I don't any more about Flash than your typical Youtube user, so I'm floundering a bit!

The website to be demo'd is is designed to run at a minimum res of 1024x768. We'd like to be able to show it on any device, but I suspect text would be unreadable on any mobile devices, so they're probably out of the equation...(?)

So far, I've got these requirements, but I suspect some of them are redundant, or too open to make any odds... do you have any suggestions?

FLV file

Player version: Adobe Flash Player v6+ Adobe Flash Lite v3+

Browser compliance: IE6,7,8 Firefox 3,4 Chrome, Safari, Opera latest versions

OS compliance: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Win7 Mac OS X Linux (?)

Mobile: ?

Web compliance:

(our wesbite is !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd")

Security Flash cookies: no

Any help would be much appreciated!

Ross Brooker
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  • FLV was introduced later in Flash MX(6) and only works with videos compressed with the SorensonSpark codec, while Flash Player 8+ can supports the On2 VP6 video codec. I would say, the easiest way is to have the animator/motion artist creating the presentation deliver in both flv and quicktime formats (with the right codecs) so you can have an html fallback in case flash is not supported on some of the mobile platforms. Will IE6 bring such a large amount of traffic/clients that will justify paying the extra development time/headaches for supporting it ? – George Profenza Apr 06 '11 at 10:45
  • George, thanks. Yes, I'm sure we could ask for a non-FLV version too, and host that on our site. The target audience is mostly going to be Independent Financial Advisers... the IE6 requirement is mostly for corporate users who are stuck with it (because they're on Win2K or less - like us). – Ross Brooker Apr 06 '11 at 10:55

2 Answers2

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Flash V6 is really a tough requirement. It's 8 years old! IE6 is also quite hard to meet without (useless) additional development costs. If you want to exclude mobile devices, you should also exclude FlashLite and ask for a more recent version of Flash.

In general, if you have no reason for sticking to one version, don't stick to it. Flash 10, IE7, FF3, Chrome, Safari, Opera.

OS requirement is useless since it doesn't change anything to the browsing interpretation and experience.

Web compliance is a matter you want to consider for Search Engine Optimization, accessibility, compatibility...

Kodiak
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For the flash version, you're safe targetting FP10, and you could even bump for 10.1: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

I'd specify AS3, as any design company still using AS2 for their flash needs as so far behind the curve that I wouldn't have confidence in their abilities.

Ignore browser compliance: it's flash, it just works.

Ignore OS compliance: it's flash, it just works (At the very least they should test it though).

Mobile: For the most part, if the phone supports flash, you should be fine. Where this is important though is optimisation (small file size for SWF and assets, good memory management, good speed, throttling the frame rate when it's not needed...). Depending on your site and what you do, take care with video etc. Basically, anything you see on Flash Site of the Day (http://www.thefwa.com/) is probably going to brick your phone, so it's really how important this is to you.

Web compliance: if you want your site to be indexable by Google etc, it takes extra work

Accessibility: if you want your site to be usable by special needs users (screen readers, keyboard-only navigation etc), it takes extra work.

Security flash cookies: not sure what you mean by this, but cookies are standard and probably done at a browser level rather than flash level (unless you're using shared objects for storing settings etc). In any case, it's not really a problem

Depending on how much flash is in the site (i.e. if it's a full flash site, or a html site with flash elements) these points become stronger or weaker - if you're including html in the bargain then you've different elements to look for. For the most part, the company should know all this stuff if they're any good.

Depending on how much content you have in your site, it may need an internal search (takes more work), or work with internal pages (i.e. it's possible to go to mysite.com/shop/item#blah and not be only able to go to mysite.com and have to manually navigate to the page every time)

A final point I'd put in is to make sure it's actually useful. Full flash sites that are just flashgasm intros and 20 minute long transitions betweens pages etc really suck. Hard. It might look cool but you'll hurt your business as for most people your site is useful if it's convenient.

divillysausages
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  • @diviliysausages, thanks! I don't think I made one thing plain - the flash is just to create a demo of our existing website - I don't expect it to live as part of the the site, so it doesn't need to be SEO'd, or set for special needs... instead we'll be emailing a link to potential users of the site, to demonstrate how good it is. – Ross Brooker Apr 06 '11 at 11:30
  • So the most important aspects to balance are: high quality of presentation, reasonable bandwidth usage, easy to meet technical requirements - to ensure it's as easy to access as possible. It's good to hear (and see via that link) that most users are up-to-date with their flash plugins, and targeting v10 is going to be safe – Ross Brooker Apr 06 '11 at 11:30