Flash is going to have to have its own Category now (but not right now), because I’m doing so much of it lately (at OSG and also with a new project I joined). I think it is inevitable that it will come up that somebody can’t (and won’t use Flash). Even though it’s widely supported and integrated now, I believe that I need to do it (provide alternate non-Flash pages” to conserve bandwidth for bandwidth challenged browsing persons).

M y idea is to develop some ASP pages (which the server will serve up , as with all ASP pages, as pure HTML after scripting has done its thing). The nav bars can be simulated fairly closely using javascript and smaller derivatives of the graphics needed for rollovers (or even eschew “rollover effects” altogether.)

The main content can be an ASP page that pulls text from the same database from which the Flssh text could come (right now, the Flash text is all static and Flash-fonts are used. I could do what I’ve done on another project and pull out the static text and put it in a datbase that contains text for each page (each page a different record, which is tied to its “Navigation Level” heirarchical relationship (eg. 7 “main links” , each of which could have as few as none and as many as “however many” sublevels under it). I use the FileSystem Object to write text files each time the database has an insert or an update. This enables me to use the Flash dynamic text fetching method , so that when the database does its update and the ASP script inititiates a “file put”, the Flash Page reflects the change. No Flash re-publish” is required. The same data could then be used by the ASP page (directly from the database using ADO and the Dreamweaver Databinding tools, to display the same stuff, formatted by CSS to resemble the Flash as closely as possible for the most oft used browsers and font types).

I wish there was a tool somehwere that would help with this. Since ALL of this work is done in Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (which has Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks)….at least the part where it would generate graphics from the same graphic imported into flash, and locate it using tables or layers to match its locale in the Flash document. Maybe even indicate the location of a data-bound section where dynamic text was placed into the Flash document.