Sunday, July 11, 2010

Web Page Raspberry--Pass the Bromo-Seltzer

The Bromo-Seltzer Tower has been an icon in downtown Baltimore for almost a century. And they have their own web page, http://www.bromoseltzertower.com/ . This is all good. However, it is entirely impossible to navigate the site without flash. There is nothing I've seen at the site that requires flash, so this seems like a case of a web developer who likes flash and uses it whether appropriate or not. The site crashed my browser twice this morning.

Of course, flash is one of the larger technological threats to web security, and works much more slowly than static content or server-side scripts. And there doesn't appear to be any substantial content at the site that isn't static.

There are better alternatives, though:
  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerson_Bromo-Seltzer_Tower
  2. http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/baltimore/b17.htm
  3. http://www.baltimoresun.com/topic/economy-business-finance/bromo-seltzer-tower-PLTRA000097.topic
The site itself is designed by folks at http://www.missionmedia.net/ , which have a web site that's all flash and no usability themselves.

Soundtrack: The Church, Sometime Anywhere, Disk 2

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