2005 in review: JavaScript arrives, and so does Flash

I wrote a lot of JavaScript this year, and built a lot of Flash. Both come from the same impulse: a page made of text and images had stopped being enough, and there were exactly two ways to do anything else.

The two roads

Flash was the one clients asked for by name. Movement, sound, a font that was not one of the six you could rely on, and identical rendering everywhere. In 2005 that last point was not a small thing: it was the only technology where what you built was what everyone saw.

JavaScript was the other road, and in 2005 it was a worse tool. No libraries worth the name yet, so every behaviour was written against the browsers directly, with branches for each one. Roughly this, over and over:

function getElem(id) {
    if (document.getElementById) return document.getElementById(id);
    if (document.all) return document.all[id];               // IE4
    if (document.layers) return document.layers[id];         // Netscape 4
    return null;
}

Three branches to find an element. That is the whole reason the libraries that arrived two years later took over so completely: they did not add capability, they deleted this.

Why I kept choosing Flash

Because it worked, and because it sold. A Flash intro was a line item a client understood and paid for. My own agency site was built in it, and I have the Dreamweaver note files for home.swf and player.swf to prove it.

What I did not weigh at all, because nobody was weighing it in 2005: none of that content was text as far as anything else was concerned. Not to a search engine, not to a screen reader, not to anyone who could not run the plugin. We were building sites whose content was not really on the web, and it took a phone that refused to run the plugin to end the argument.

In short

JavaScript and Flash both entered the work in volume, for the same reason: text and images had stopped being enough.