<farnsworth>Good news everyone!</farnsworth>: Adobe today announced the new searchability features of Flash complete with a specifications document of the SWF format.

This means that as hackers we can now access SWFs on a very low level to extract data that might not be available to end users (those who have no flash, or cannot navigate it).

Piggy-backing on this Google announced that they are indexing SWF and according to Adobe Yahoo! are soon to follow.

This is good news and bad news. For some years people have been using Google to read PDF documents (as Google indexed them and offered an HTML version and because it is terribly hard to create accessible PDFs or, as Heni put it, that PDFs suck!. Now Google can be used as a cheap way around the Flash issue, too.

Both means though that companies are more likely even less inclined to spend extra effort to make data available independent of plug-ins. The old “if it doesn’t work in a screen reader, it’ll be impossible to find by search engines” argument is out of the window now. Shame, it worked well (although we shouldn’t have to force people to consider accessibility).

The other really terrible news about this is that Flash generated by JavaScript will not be indexed at all:

“Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.”

This is really bad as using SWFObject to include your Flash in web sites is the only sensible way - you test for support before you apply and you enhance progressively. There has to be a way around this problem. Just making it indexable by search engines should not stop people from assuming users have the right flash version.