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MTV Updated Site, Teenager(s) Outraged

April 26, 2007 by Brian

MTV.com took a great step forward today in internet evolution (like wired.com did 5 years ago), axing the total Flash site for an accessible and creative XHTML one. For the technically challenged, Flash is basically a movie or animation clip. You can upload flash movies on your website (it’s what YouTube uses). It is great for movies. But people went overboard and started to build entire websites from flash movies. Here’s what’s wrong with them:

All the content (i.e. words) are not search-able, as they are embedded in the movie
The site is not accessible to people visually impaired
The movies are huge and sites are very slow as it takes so much time to download the flash
They are not easy to manage, adding new stuff is a big pain as you need to manipulate flash files and upload.

In short: full-flash sites suck ass.

The new MTV.com features content in text, so it can be searched. The content can also be updated easier, so it should get updated more often. They have this rad abstract art cycled in for the background. It is faster, it has better searching, etc.

But that’s not what all the mewing teenagers (at least the ones posting to their blog) would have you believe. I am trying to figure out if it is just one disgusted poster who can’t watch his Whitesnake videos from work or really a consensus from the crowd. I think it may be the former, as during the previews, they received good feedback.

Related: Dan at Simplebits (a local designer) helped on the site, so I may be a bit biased as his work totally rocks!

Posted in rants, techie |

Comments... (5)

I hate Flash sites. I totally agree. Where is your crown cause you are the king of the interweb for sure.

Comment by youmybabydaddy — April 26, 2007 @ 3:56 pm

Brian - i must give you props because i think you actually put my boyfriend to shame in daily happenings of tech online.

Comment by mofitta — April 27, 2007 @ 1:25 pm

I never use/used the MTV site, so I don’t know its particulars. But for comparable content, it’s faster as a single binary stream than as a sequence of queued HTTP requests.

Still, go back and check the comments at that blog, from the people who used the interface… nearly 500 comments so far! And the majority sentiment is “Bring back the Flash!” Why do you think they feel so strongly…?

jd/adobe

Comment by John Dowdell — April 28, 2007 @ 8:34 pm

Hi John,

I argue binary flash equivalent sites are *not* faster, especially considering the load on the client to initiate and render the UI. Also, most webservers like apache can be setup to use gzip/compression for text-based content. HTML sites are faster. Oh, and my scroll-wheel works (OSX and Linux desktops). And I can copy-paste. And I don’t need any special IDE’s to edit. Etc.

I was thinking about MTV’s switch a bit more, and think they have a “get it for free” bonus that may have not been planned. Whenever I search for a band (in Google), I typically find the band site (maybe), but most certainly a myspace page and a wikipedia entry. This is because the content is accessible to web-search robots. I imagine in the near future, MTV may be among the first-page results, as their band biography content is now no longer locked into a proprietary format.

As to why the negative feedback - I think it stems from two issues: 1) Because the content is accessible, firewall software at many companies can now see the content isn’t work-related and can more easily determine to block it and 2) people are unfamiliar with what I consider a much more usable navigation. And I think it is common to see more negative feedback than positive - it is the nature of our society. I also doubt people are commenting on the technology choice - more like using “flash-site” to identify the old MTV.com and “HTML site” to mean the new site.

I really do think flash has it’s place. I am a big fan of (and have built applications) with bits of embedded Flex2 Charting, for instance. Many of our projects use sIFR. And sometimes flash is nice for dynamic content and it is the de-facto for embedded movie players. But I fully endorse open standards and think that web content ought to be in HTML (Even Adobe.com is mostly HTML). I also endorse MTV.com’s decision to go with a web-standards approach.

Comment by Brian — April 29, 2007 @ 5:45 pm

I’ll debate this with you any time.

Your comments:
All the content (i.e. words) are not search-able, as they are embedded in the movie
The site is not accessible to people visually impaired
The movies are huge and sites are very slow as it takes so much time to download the flash
They are not easy to manage, adding new stuff is a big pain as you need to manipulate flash files and upload.

Let’s address them one at a time, shall we?
1. All content is not searchable as it’s embed in the movie.
Wrong, you can access external XML or a Database that contains all the information, you can then serve up a page that pulls in the XML data and makes it viewable with CSS and Searchable, then if a user has Flash the Flash will be seen.

2. The site is not accessible to people visually impaired
Wrong. It is possible to change font sizes and make the movie keyboard accessable.

3. The movies are huge and sites are very slow as it takes so much time to download the flash
Wrong. I’ve been able to deliver an entire catalog for a huge client online and the SWF was 100k and that 100k contains every gender and all products in one swf. Not to mention I’ve been 100’s of site with Flash and have always been able to build them with super small file sizes.

4. They are not easy to manage, adding new stuff is a big pain as you need to manipulate flash files and upload.
See number 1. Flash is so easy to update when built correctly.

Now to cut you off before you start spewing more wrong things….
You can bookmark Flash sites and you can use the browsers forward and back buttons on Flash sites.

Just because too many idiots have developed site with Flash doesn’t mean the technology isn’t good, it simply means the developer sucks.

Flash is such a great tool for websites and is more powerful than you think.

Comment by GetReal — May 7, 2007 @ 11:22 pm

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I hate Flash sites. I totally agree. Where is your crown cause you are the king of the interweb for sure.

Comment by youmybabydaddy — April 26, 2007 @ 3:56 pm
Brian - i must give you props because i think you actually put my boyfriend to shame in daily happenings of tech online.

Comment by mofitta — April 27, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
I never use/used the MTV site, so I don’t know its particulars. But for comparable content, it’s faster as a single binary stream than as a sequence of queued HTTP requests.

Still, go back and check the comments at that blog, from the people who used the interface… nearly 500 comments so far! And the majority sentiment is “Bring back the Flash!” Why do you think they feel so strongly…?

jd/adobe

Comment by John Dowdell — April 28, 2007 @ 8:34 pm
Hi John,

I argue binary flash equivalent sites are *not* faster, especially considering the load on the client to initiate and render the UI. Also, most webservers like apache can be setup to use gzip/compression for text-based content. HTML sites are faster. Oh, and my scroll-wheel works (OSX and Linux desktops). And I can copy-paste. And I don’t need any special IDE’s to edit. Etc.

I was thinking about MTV’s switch a bit more, and think they have a “get it for free” bonus that may have not been planned. Whenever I search for a band (in Google), I typically find the band site (maybe), but most certainly a myspace page and a wikipedia entry. This is because the content is accessible to web-search robots. I imagine in the near future, MTV may be among the first-page results, as their band biography content is now no longer locked into a proprietary format.

As to why the negative feedback - I think it stems from two issues: 1) Because the content is accessible, firewall software at many companies can now see the content isn’t work-related and can more easily determine to block it and 2) people are unfamiliar with what I consider a much more usable navigation. And I think it is common to see more negative feedback than positive - it is the nature of our society. I also doubt people are commenting on the technology choice - more like using “flash-site” to identify the old MTV.com and “HTML site” to mean the new site.

I really do think flash has it’s place. I am a big fan of (and have built applications) with bits of embedded Flex2 Charting, for instance. Many of our projects use sIFR. And sometimes flash is nice for dynamic content and it is the de-facto for embedded movie players. But I fully endorse open standards and think that web content ought to be in HTML (Even Adobe.com is mostly HTML). I also endorse MTV.com’s decision to go with a web-standards approach.

Comment by Brian — April 29, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
I’ll debate this with you any time.

Your comments:
All the content (i.e. words) are not search-able, as they are embedded in the movie
The site is not accessible to people visually impaired
The movies are huge and sites are very slow as it takes so much time to download the flash
They are not easy to manage, adding new stuff is a big pain as you need to manipulate flash files and upload.

Let’s address them one at a time, shall we?
1. All content is not searchable as it’s embed in the movie.
Wrong, you can access external XML or a Database that contains all the information, you can then serve up a page that pulls in the XML data and makes it viewable with CSS and Searchable, then if a user has Flash the Flash will be seen.

2. The site is not accessible to people visually impaired
Wrong. It is possible to change font sizes and make the movie keyboard accessable.

3. The movies are huge and sites are very slow as it takes so much time to download the flash
Wrong. I’ve been able to deliver an entire catalog for a huge client online and the SWF was 100k and that 100k contains every gender and all products in one swf. Not to mention I’ve been 100’s of site with Flash and have always been able to build them with super small file sizes.

4. They are not easy to manage, adding new stuff is a big pain as you need to manipulate flash files and upload.
See number 1. Flash is so easy to update when built correctly.

Now to cut you off before you start spewing more wrong things….
You can bookmark Flash sites and you can use the browsers forward and back buttons on Flash sites.

Just because too many idiots have developed site with Flash doesn’t mean the technology isn’t good, it simply means the developer sucks.

Flash is such a great tool for websites and is more powerful than you think.

Comment by GetReal — May 7, 2007 @ 11:22 pm

MTV Updated Site, Teenager(s) Outraged

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