HeidiAllen.com

I’d like to take a moment to stick up for a couple of people that I hate.

First up is holocaust revisionist David Irving. I’m Jewish, but I understand that a nation’s freedom of speech is only as strong as the offensiveness of the speech that it defends. Austria has now sentenced Irving to a 3 year prison term, apparently to prove to critics that they’re no longer glossing over their Nazi past.

Second up is Saddam Hussein. You read right. Everyone knows that the man was an evil, murderous dictator. It’s still not acceptable to lie about him just to forward one’s own political agenda. Donald Rumsfeld published an op-ed piece in the Lebanese Daily Star today claiming that “Saddam Hussein’s mass graves were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.”

C’mon, Donald. That claim was debunked back in July of 2004. Couldn’t you have made your point with the actual number of victims? 5,000 human beings murdered is horrific enough.

This lie is particularly despicable coming from the man who, in 1984, was in Baghdad meeting with Hussein’s foreign minister on the day that the UN confirmed Hussein had used mustard gas on Iranian soldiers. Rumsfeld still spent the afternoon restoring normal diplomatic ties between Iraq and the United States.

During the time that Rumsfeld was Reagan’s Middle East envoy, the US sold two fleets of helicopters to Saddam. These were later used to drop poison gas on Kurdish civilians. Rumsfeld had no comment at the time. Now he mentions it whenever he wants to play on our outrage.

Towards the end of the op-ed piece, Rumsfeld makes a statement that isn’t supported by anything else in his article. He says, “We are fighting a war in which the survival of our way of life is at stake.”

Huh? Where are the facts or logic to support that amazing claim? Then he ends with a statement that is at once ironic and nauseating:

“…truth is on our side, and, ultimately, truth wins out.”

Oh, Donald, Donald… I wish you knew what truth was.

(Update: There are times when Flash is useful. Examples include artist and musician websites, and instructional materials. In fact, hiding images in Flash is a great way to make them harder to steal. Unfortunately, the great majority of websites that use Flash have no practical purpose for doing so, and plenty of reasons why they shouldn’t.)

More and more companies are allowing misguided website designers to build them entire sites using Macromedia Flash. With very few exceptions, this will cause the company to actually lose customers. Here’s why:

~ Some users don’t already have Flash installed, and they don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading and installing it just to view your site.

~ According to Arbitron, a little less than half of all internet users still use dial-up. They just want information. If they have to wait for a Flash presentation to load, they’ll probably go elsewhere.

~ The website won’t load unless it’s in the foreground window. You may think this is a good thing, but…

~ Most website users don’t want to be forced to view your Flash intro.

~ They don’t want to have to wait for the ‘Skip Intro’ link to appear.

~ You do have a ‘Skip Intro’ link… don’t you? If not, you’ve just lost potential customers.

~ Many of your visitors are listening to music while surfing the web. When your music automatically loads, it creates audio cacophony. The fastest way for the user to end this cacophony is to close your site.

~ Everytime the visitor returns to your site, they have to wait for the Flash presentation to load again before they can click on ‘Skip Intro’ and get to what they wanted. This gets old fast.

~ Once the user has skipped the intro, Flash sites usually load into frames. This means that your users can’t bookmark a particular page. If the site is large, finding that page again will be such a hassle that the user will probably decide against bookmarking your site at all.

~ When Flash sites open in a new window, the URL and Back/Forward controls are hidden. Most web users aren’t savvy enough to know how to make these important controls display again, and they don’t want to start over. They may leave instead.

~ When users right click on the page, there are no Back/Forward options.

~ When users right click on a page, there is no ‘Add to Favorites’ option.

~ For whatever reason, many Flash site designers seem to have skipped learning how to create a usable website interface with intuitive navigation.

Here’s a fun test: Pretend you’re ready to buy. Try to find useful information about a specific product at this site. Go ahead… I dare you!