Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Stop making scrollbars in SWF when displaying Text

Quoting Hoss Gifford text from his SWF sample

http://hossgifford.com/resizer/

This is a plea to you, the Flash developer community,
to stop making your own fucking scrollbars. They are fiddly,
non-standard and unintuitive to the average web user.

The thing is, all browsers already have scrollbars. And they
work really well. And everyone knows how to use them. But the
biggest criticism that Flash sites get again and again is their
fixed ‘letterbox’ format with text scrolling within an area of
that letterbox using some proprietary means of interactivity.

This doesn’t have to be the case. This file is a demonstration
of a technique that resizes the flash movie within the html page
to fit the content within the movie. It’s free to use and abuse,
whether you copy and paste it verbatim into your work, or if you
hack and slash it into something that suits the specifics of your
project.

Props to Geoff Stearns for his wonderful swfObject which this latest
version uses to greatly simplify things. Please check
"http://blog.deconcept.com/" for the latest version of swfObject as I
offer no guarantee that the version here is the most recent.

"Hoss Gifford,"
Glasgow,
14/11/2005

http://www.hossgifford.com/downloads.htm

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