The site is not designed yet, but designers are asking if they can use flash based XML driven dynamic menus. Can spiders crawl and index this type of menu structure? I am not looking for a link to Lynx or some other text based viewer, as the site isn't designed, so there is no point looking at it through that type of tool. Does anyone have an answer, or can you point me to a resource that explains what Google can crawl and what it can't. I know that flash is normally not crawlable, but is that ALL flash?? Thanks in advance for your response.
From what I know, as long as the links are not in a javascript format then google can crawl them. To be on the safe side I would ask them to just make the links static, or you could use rollover images that do not affect anything. And I would not worry about using flash unless you plan on putting your content inside of it. Flash does not stop a site from ranking well on the search engines.