Luster over Functionality

The State of Delaware has released they’re new public sex offender’s registry. It is quite an improvement upon the antiquated registry they once displayed. However, I have quite a few reservations of my own. Apart from lacking any originality the registry is entirely written in Adobe Flex, a flash/AIR based product produced by Adobe. Now I agree that luster has it’s place in IT, however that place is far down at the bottom in the list of priorities. Functionality and security must always be the foremost concern in any application. Obviously my opinion is quite biased since I am the founder and developer of DelawareOffenders.org. But let me list a couple of reasons not to use flash for a production grade product.

• Accessibility – Good luck getting that screen reader to work with Adobe Flash (yes, it is possible if the site is designed well).
• Bandwidth – The registries application is over 1.9 megabytes. This does not take API communication into account!
• Browser interface interference, the user cannot use browser features like history, favorites, text based find tools, and of course the back button.
• Search engines – Flash applications are notorious for causing SEO problems.
• Printing – Many systems still have trouble printing flash based web sites.
• There is more, but my point is quite justified so far.

A sex offender’s registry is by far the least appropriate place for such an application. Unfortunately many things on this project were not implemented correctly, especially the mapping system. New information will soon become available to DelawareOffenders.org, including vehicular information for sex offender’s.

While DelawareOffenders.org currently cannot receive updates, rest assured a patch is on the way. Within hours the new registry’s flash application was reverse engineered and a new back end is in the works. Unfortunately I do not have as much time available as I would like to devote to this, so please bear with me for a little while.

The above article is strictly my opinion, if anybody has a problem with the above stated disagreements, feel free to leave a comment.