jQuery - An Alternative to Flash
Since Apple’s decision to not support flash on their mobile devices, there has been an increasing demand for flash alternatives leading developers to find new ways to deliver similar effects.
At uc4 a project was undertaken to develop a slideshow that could run on Apple devices, across multiple desktop browsers and contain key parts of SEO. All while looking good and replicating simple and commonly used flash effects.
This new plug-in was built, heavily tested, then installed on ikano.net using the existing flash movie they had as a basis for how the plug-in should work.
Although the Ikano slideshow is not rich in keywords, it does demonstrate the ability to make it so. A flash movie would contain one alt tag and rely on search robots decoding what they could. Although search engines have got better at indexing flash websites, but they are still nowhere near smart enough to extract as much accurate data as they can from a raw HTML website.
As a pure image slideshow there would have been no timed text effects without duplicating images, and just a single alt tag for each image. On our slideshow we have the alt tag for each image and what ever text is placed within the stage as pure html to work with making it an extremely good substitute for flash not just visually, compatibly but also giving which ever website it is on the ability to have more weight within search engines.
With the increase in web traffic from mobile web browsers, lead predominantly by Apple products, flash usage has taken a hit. According to Adobe 90-95% of web users have flash support. This may sound like a high number, but take into account the figure reversed, 5 – 10% do not. This is a high proportion to ignore. Add on to this the number who have it disabled or have uninstalled it, how many keep their players up to date and how many only enable it on a site by site basis.
In the last 12 months according to figures from w3techs.com, the amount of websites making use of flash has declined by around 2% with the increase in javascript matching that figure. In addition to this, the usage of jQuery has increased by 13% with other libraries usage staying at around the same level.
