One little thing that bugs me everyday when I visit my favourite game site : that famous GameSpot.com, is the today-hilight flash which is located in the most valuable area of the whole page. See the picture if you can’t imagine where it is:
Yes, that box which shows Windows Vista logo. This type of flash-box is widely used in many websites, showing what content they’d like to present today, therefore the most clicked link of the entire web.
Because its area is considered high-value, the developers tend to use the trick that enable you to click “next” link inside the flash itself to navigate through all hilight content, even without any clicking, it will somehow rotate those contents by timely manner.
So what annoyed me? Those content are very interesting and I want to read them all. I’m kind of person that click all links at once, then read one page, while waiting for another pages to be completely loaded. But with the deefficiency of Flash, I can’t do that. I can’t neither use the middle-button of a mouse (in Firefox) to open new tab, nor use the old-way Shift-click to open new Window.
Actually, when we create a link in Flash, we have options (targets) to have the link openned in like those we have with the a tag in html: _blank, _parent, and so on, but if we force the link using “_blank” target, it will be openned in a new window every time. This may not be a preferred option for some users, who want to have only a single window.
We may have to write our own ActionScript to deal with this problem. More to come.