The new trailer for TRON LEGACY appeared on the internets this week and while everyone was gasping and getting over excited about it I was watching it on an almost permanent loop while developing the Official TRON site for Disney UK.

My job was to recreate the teaser site the US had supplied, which was entirely in Flash, in HTML*. The reason? To make it SEO friendly, or at least more friendly than the US site would have been had we just localised it.

The end result is a combination of HTML, CSS transitions and jQuery effects. It made me think about the whole HTML5 vs Flash debate that seems to be permanently being discussed right now and Dan Mall’s article was very timely for me. In it he says:

We should be getting to the point where people can’t tell how a site was built. I love coming across a site where how it was made is not immediately apparent to me.

And I’d like to think that’s what has happened here, without delving into the code most users will probably assume the whole site is built in Flash whereas in actual fact it’s only the video player that is. (Unfortunately Jilion’s HTML5 video player isn’t ready for the public domain just yet, if it was I certainly would have had a go at implementing it to make it all HTML)

Word is there’s an all singing all dancing Flash Experience TRON site on the way to replace this teaser site nearer the time of the film’s release which by all accounts will not be able to be recreated using HTML. So for now, this is my little testament to “It doesn’t matter how it’s made as long as the user enjoys it”.

*Obviously by HTML I mean HTML, CSS and Javascript - in this case jQuery.