MODx and Flash

I've always been a serious fan of Flash, I don't think there's a better tool for designers as you can build pretty much anything you can imagine. Although that's not always a good thing when you consider the usability sins early Flash work commited in terms of scrollbars that didn't resemble scrollbars in any way, shape or form but the components are solving that problem.

Anyway, as much as I would love to create every site in Flash I can't, simply because it's lousy when it comes to search engine indexing. Such as shame, as this I think is the major constraint that has held Flash back since day one. Google I know indexes Flash but I'm yet to see a Flash site in a high position for a competitive search term, it just isn't going to happen.

I suppose as well there are occassions such as when designing a very content intensive site Flash probably isn't the tool for the job. I do recall in days of old when Macromedia used Flash for content pages in their site and they had some rather slick features as a result but it wasn't long until they removed it and went back to plain HTML which was similar to scoring an own goal in my book.

What does get me excited is the prospect of being able to output content from a CMS like MODx or Umbraco into Flash as that would be really cool. The CMS could be used to manage the content and then Flash can be used to render it to the browser with all the bells and whistles. To ensure the search engines are satisfied I'd want to output the content to a HTML site as well, running from the same content as Flash. So updating the content in the CMS would update the Flash and HTML site.

I wonder if we could use the JavaScript flashObject script to embed Flash into the HTML site, over the HTML content?

So lets say I arrive at the site and I have Flash, the SWF could be inserted by JavaScript over the HTML version so therefore giving me the best experience. But a search engine would still be able to index the site as a standard HTML website, interesting prospect.