The Doors’ website is what I expect from a website probably produced with no input from the band and designed to sell the band’s “coolness” to the MySpace generation with a gritty, visually engaging experience.

What annoys me most is that (in Firefox on Vista) the flash seemingly captures my mouse’s scroll wheel but does nothing with the input – leaving me unable to scroll with my mouse.

I was of course horrified at first to see all that text-as-image, but a look at the markup reveals that the content is actually available in the HTML so people with screen readers or text-only browsers can still read it.

But on closer inspection I noticed that one of the paragraphs of text is completely different from the image version it is supposed to represent. That says to me that the producers of the site are merely box-ticking for accessibility and not properly testing, nor really caring. These people are only interested in finding the balance between outlay on development costs and fraction of the target audience reached, not art.

The gist of what they do (and they admit) is they work with labels to distribute half songs, noise, looping video to p2p/bittorrent sites. Essentially to dilute those sharing services. On their side they think they are providing a service to the labels and music industry as a whole. However they are just adding more noise to the already noisey landscape. It has become so easy for someone to post music online, it has become harder and harder to find the right “signals” that we individually enjoy.

This myopic view of the industry is why they are hemorging money in my opinion. Take for example the experience we all get to this day (probably for the last 8 years) of clicking on a music file. A white screen with a quicktime (or other) player. Now there is the solution. Great article here – http://fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=127

My main problem to Flash is the same as my main problem with .pdfs. It’s one company’s proprietary system. Yes, it’s open in many ways, but not fundamentally, and that’s where it’s at variance from the spirit of the Net and the Web.

My other problem is the one I detailed in the post: too many implementations flat-out suck. The Doors’ is an outstanding example: it fails on all three platforms I run here. Maybe it works for you, but not for me. Forgive me for finding that sucky.

If I want to “experience” The Doors on their site, I’d rather opt into it than opt out. Especially when opting out consists of crashing my machine.