Once upon a time, all web pages were written in Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML), a set of computer instructions intended to be rendered by browser programs to display formatted text and images. Simple, intuitive, and flexible, HTML remains the standard code for web design, and virtually all sites employ some form of it somewhere in the design.

If it were 1994, this article would end here.  But with the explosion of the Internet, the limitations of HTML have brought new solutions to the art and science of displaying media.

Constructing a site using tables, where the code for a page is contained in a single document, is largely an historical curiosity at this point. While some hobbyists and amateurs still design pages this way, professional designers use CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, to define the variable characteristics and placement of text and objects for the site.

Combined with CSS, HTML remains a valid and popular way to code a “static” website, in which the content remains essentially the same and new pages are generated manually. Both types of code also play a major part in dynamic sites based on PHP (or ASP for Windows).

In recent years, however, web designers have increasingly taken another route, taking advantage of the media-rich Macromedia Flash format. Flexible and stunning in presentation, programming a navigation structure in Flash allows real-time effects to load for visitors, often with dramatic results.

For web designers who specialize in using it, Flash is a virtual playground, where objects magically load and activate themselves. The format has become rather popular among both creators and visitors of webpages, but there is a downside to building a site with Flash.
 
Depending on your goals, a Flash-based design could be the key to making your site stand out against the competition-or it could completely trainwreck the project. Many Flash sites go over the top with special effects, annoying the visitor with lengthy load times and unnecessary distractions from the essential content.

Another issue is compatibility with PCs and browsers which are not Flash-enabled, or are using an outdated version. These users often hit the back button rather than download the most recent version of Flash before viewing your content.

Perhaps the most unfortunate feature of Flash is the effect it can have on nonhuman visitors-the search engine “bot” programs which index web pages and assess the content for ranking in Google, Yahoo, Live Search and others. While the “crawlers” are beginning to add the capacity of reading Flash text, they have been traditionally unable to do so, and this can have a disastrous effect on traffic referred from search results.

The problem has to do with the nature of search engines. Web crawlers index the text on a page, including HTML, to identify the subject matter. However, when the words on a web page are embedded within an image, video, or Flash template, the search engine is unable to read them. This can be remedied by using HTML in combination with Flash, until the technology of search engine spiders catches up with the technology of design.