flensed - how flash becomes useful again
flensed is a set of javascript+swf tools to spice up your websites with flash goodness, in a graceful, unobtrusive, degradable, accessible, and user-experience-friendly way.
Website visitors are very picky these days, because they have come to expect an engaging user experience (Web 2.0+), but they get turned off by too much whizz-bang getting in their way. They get bored on plain websites easily, but just as easily will criticize a fancy site for too much fluff and not enough substance. Or worse, the user experience is degraded or broken for them because they are visiting with a buggy browser/platform environment, and the site fails to degrade gracefully for them. So how do we find the right balance?
To borrow an analogy from food: Too much fat is bad. Too little fat is bad. And the wrong kind of fat is also bad. Any good thing in excess loses its usefulness. But the right amount and kind of fat in your diet is actually healthy!
Flash on a website is a lot like fat in food. Too often, it's used too much or too little, or it's just plain used poorly. SWF misuse is unfortunately common, and it's why many developers frown upon flash altogether.
But now things are changing. A new revolution for SWF on the web is here.
The underlying strategy for all flensed projects is the use of "micro-SWFs", meaning many small (sometimes invisible) but powerful SWF instances, created and controlled by smart javascript, with HTML layout and CSS determining positioning and styling, just like any other webpage element. The goal is to use only as much Flash as is necessary to accomplish the task, no more, no less.