Flexible standards with Flex

Not written much lately as a change of jobs tends to throw everything up in the air. But I spent most of the day reading around Adobe's Flex 2 and so I thought I'd put a few of my thoughts down for posterity's sake, if only so I can come back and laugh at how wrong I was.

I spent sometime looking around and how you "skin" Flex applications, as it will be essential to keep them in line with the company branding. I also looked at the accessibility of Flex to see how it compares against Flash and XHTML.

The first thing that struck me with Flex, is that by default accessibility is turned off. This seems to be because of the performance hit that is taken when it is switched on. The saving grace is that it seems you can "turn on" accessibility from including it as part of the URL, which is great as it puts the user in control; as long as the application has been built with accessibility in mind and that there is an accessible way of switching it on, such as a hidden link at the top of the XHTML page it's embedded in - if that's possible.

The other concern was that while the built in components have been built to be accessible - with some flaws, that building your own components and making them accessible is A LOT of work... In the words of Adobe:

"Because the effort involved in creating accessible components is significant, we recommend that developers use the components provided when accessible applications are required"

While there are 23 components provided, this still sets obvious limitations.

Next I looked into how to change the look and feel of Flex, mostly concentrating in the CSS sides of things, since this is very familiar territory.
As far as I could tell you can use CSS for basic changes like changing the font, but the layout is all controlled in the MXML. The thing that struck me most was when I looked at Adobe Consulting's Style Explorer which nicely demonstrates the flexibility of the UI (excuse the pun) but when I looked at the CSS being produced I was a in for a nasty surprise. It's not so much CSS as it's evil twin. Don't get me wrong it does some great stuff I've always wished CSS would do that easily. But it totally chucks W3C standards out the door, and really shouldn't call itself CSS at all. There's no layout controls, but it does some cool stuff like drop shadows and gradients, which I keep hoping CSS 3 will offer.

Any way a real mixed response today, some good stuff, some bad. The most interesting thing for me is that it allows designers and developers to work on the same code. As someone who often walks a fine line between both it'll be interesting to see if this really can bridge that gap.