We had us some fun, burnin’ it up like a billion little suns
Turning it day from night, yea we did it up right
It was a hydrocarbon party that was ragin’ for generations
But the Sun’s coming up now and, man, it ain’t prettyWe’re on the back-side of the peak (Hubbert’s Peak)
And it’s fallin’, fallin’, fallin’ down (fossil fuel production)
And we better start facing up to it (economic contraction)
Living on the backside of the peakWe had the power of the gods and the mind of a child
Energy-dense and pound-foolish – it’s a dangerous combination
Building towers to the heavens, digging pits halfway to hell
Moving mountains, oh we had so much energy to burn[Chorus]
We sucked the rivers dry, ravaged the forests, emptied the oceans of fish
We wrecked the climate, wasted the soil, and perpetrated mass extinctions
Wow, what a gas! What a gas! ”¦but we’re out of gas now
(mournful sigh)
Listen to the mp3. It’s fun.
Rant on:
Well, you can listen to it after a longish wait for their Flash site to load, that is. Attention musicians: Dump Flash. Now. Takes eons to load. Can’t easily be indexed by search engines. Better alternatives exist. Thank you.
Don’t believe me? Then listen to Ethan Kaplan, Vice President of Technology at Warner Bros. Records in a 2008 blog post.
No Flash! This is simple. Flash belongs for certain things: media players and video. Nothing else. If a site isn’t easy for me to navigate, how will it be for someone on a small screen on dial up? I have four monitors and four processors for fucks sake and my processor gets pegged on any site with Flash. Say no to gratuitous SWF’s!
Plus, Flash doesn’t work at all on iPhones and other mobile devices and will probably be supplanted by HTML 5 anyway. Can’t happen too soon.
Rant off:
Flash works on my cell, but then I have an N900. 🙂
That said, flash done right isn’t a bad thing. Using it as your ONLY front page is stupid though. Web servers in this day an age can tell what browser you’re using, and should send appropriate content based on that. The default should be HTML-only content with clear and simple links to content. If you detect a browser you think can handle flash, you should send a simpe HTML page with a link to the non-flash site and some javascript to load your flash front-page. That way if you’re wrong they have a link to the non-flash interface. If you’re right, the change will happen fast enough they’ll never see the link.
The problem is you have people putting out a shingle to do web design that have had little or no experience doing such things, and people looking for a quick/cheap solution. They get their flashy page with lots of bells and whistles demoed to them in the firm, with direct connectivity, and don’t think about how/if it will work on slower connections or slower machines. A good web design group will put things in place the right way, and show you why the did it that way.
I believe that Ethan Kaplan at WB music has banned Flash sites for musicians because of the performance issues. And while you can have a Flash site pass info to search engines, many don’t, so they don’t get ranked as well as they could be.
I think HTML 5 inherently supports a lot of what Flash does. Flash has some great features but all Flash sites not done well, as you mentioned, can be ponderously slow.