exo : blah

So, the nice people at the swsx festival have released their list of finalists in their website competition, which is nice.

What isn't is that clicking on a random 5 or 6 I found only one that didn't require flash. In the experimental section only http://mc.clintock.com/ does not require flash, and to my mind is actually the best one in the category.

Now I know flash is all very nice and lets you do all sorts of spangly things with it but it always seems like such a lazy solution to me. It screams that the people involved are all from a multimedia background and see the web as a handy distribution mechanism for their self contained little apps.

It seems to me that googlism, or the trackback system for blogs is much more experimental and 'of the web' and hence more worthy of praise, especially as, from what I could see, most of the ones in the experimental category had been done before in some way.

However, most galling was http://www.nikolaskoenig.com/, a photography site that requires flash 6. So, off I go to install the plugin and do I find a site that does all sorts of things plain old HTML is incapable of? No. With the exception of a fade in transition for photos it's all doable in HTML, or at least DHTML. And I think with IE only CSS extensions you could probably do the transitions as well[0]. Just sheer laziness.

Oooh, it makes me mad. All in all it makes me think that the 5k competition is (was?[1]) the only web design competition worth anything any more.

Or am I just old fashioned?

• [0] Not that this sort of thing is to be encouraged but it's a damn site better than the flash solution.
• [1] see http://www.ntk.net/