Stop Making Scrollbars (A Usability Victory for Flash)

One of the biggest problems i’ve personally had with Flash (and flash player) is that it’s dimensions are both fixed-width and fixed-height in browser windows. This means if some flash website had text or content that falls outside of the movie’s stage, it gets inadvertenly cut/cropped off. The most common workaround is to place the content inside a movieclip and then control it via a custom scrollbar (all this created inside the Flash movie itself). This doesn’t really solve the original problem since again, your content in the scrollable movieclip is confined to a fixed-width/fixed-height.

I’ve seen variations of this, one of the most sucessful being the one on fotologue, a flash-based photosharing site. Another innovative workaround is trashing scrollbars in lieu of (for lack of a better word) page chunking, sort of like how search engines return multiple page search results. I first saw this in effect at FWA.

Traditionally, HTML had one up on flash for its flexibility in terms of capitalizing the browser screen real-estate. Apparently not anymore. Check out this awesome, awesome demo by Hoss Gifford on how to dynamically resize your Flash movie on an HTML page.

Thank you!