using flash form instead of html form

[rube]

Does anyone have any thoughts on the use of flash forms in place of HTML forms? Let me explain...

I have a dynamic shopping-cart page that shows products in a table. Instead of a small form for each product (with a quantity field and an "Add to Cart" button), I'd like to use a flash form for each product, to overcome irritating formatting issues with different browsers. I'd use an "Embed" tag for each product and pass information to each flash form through it.

I know that the small flash movies wouldn't be any bigger, memory-wise than the "Add" gif button, but can anyone forsee any problems with this?

Thanks.
Rob.

 

[wangbar]

The problem I can see initially (and it's not a particularly major one to be honest) is having several separate movies addressing the same backend script which might get confusing - it's only one user after all. I'd be more inclined to have one big movie which incorporates all the smaller items in the page so that dealing with less complex server side interaction. This has the added benefit of giving you even better control over page layout.

 

[rube]

that's true, but i'd use dynamically generated embed and object tags and call the movie using a query string (movie.swf?param1=1&param2=2, etc...) to pass values to it.

i'm worried that having twenty little flash movies will irritate browsers somehow. the beauty of it is that you only have to download one tiny form object and the html modifies each instance. also, using loadvariables, you can execute the server script that adds products to a cart without refreshing the page or redirecting.