Macromedia: More FUD About SVG 392
Robin Berjon writes "Macromedia recently announced that its latest version of Flash Lite (a limited Flash for mobile devices) was to support SVG Tiny 1.1, and support it fully (though no one has yet been able to verify that assertion). For a moment, the Web community wondered if they might be playing nice at last, after yielding to massive pressure from the mobile market to support W3C and 3GPP standards, or if they simply meant to use SVG as a trojan to get Flash into mobile devices. An article freshly published on Macromedia's web site clearly makes the case that they're after the latter, speading as much FUD as possible along the way. Thankfully, Antoine Quint decided to respond in a brief O'Reilly Net article in which he debunks Macromedia's marketing lies one by one, and expands on the wondrous features of SVG Tiny 1.1 and the shortly upcoming SVG Tiny 1.2 that make people drool before their mobile phones.
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Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:1, Insightful)
Flash Lite (Score:3, Insightful)
Who Needs Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
The last thing I want on my web enabled phone is crappy Flash content slowing my downloads even further.
I went to an online commerce site where all the merchandise was viewable only in Flash animations. I saved some money that day and the website operator lost a sale.
SVG is so good how now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Flash: Widely supported, good tool set, easy to use, looks good, performance varies but is generally acceptable if the artist didn't go massivly nuts.
SVG: Slow as hell no matter how fast your machine is, poor support, I
Honestly, I think the SVG toolset is larger than the Flash toolset, but Flash, umm, well, works.
And there is the difference folks. Flash and Shockwave are easy to install, frequently updated (albiet with slower and slower versions each time, heh, but Flash HAS gotten much more powerful over the years), and it actually shows moving image thingies at a speed faster than a crawl.
And no, don't link to Adobe's laughable SVG plugin.
Flash is not an open standard (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, a lot of phone makers want SVG-Tiny support on their phone. Macromedia wants to put Flash Lite on a lot of phones. This is an obvious way to make that happen.
But geez, there's no big conspiracy to get proprietary stuff on phones just to Stick It To You Open Source guys... we just have a technical solution that we happen to think is pretty damn good, that will suit the mobile market well. So what if it's proprietary? I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this.
Honestly, I read Slashdot daily, but I'll never understand the peculiar Flash-Is-Evil bias. Yes, there are annoying ads that use it. There are also annoying ads that use animated GIF, and even HTML. It's just a tool, folks, and like the song says, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
And for the expected flood of responses saying, "You can do this with SVG+DHTML+SMIL+etc,etc"... bollocks. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's practical.
Look: 98% of interesting interactive animated stuff on the Web is done using Flash rather than that something else. I submit to you that this is not a coincidence! Artists aren't stupid, and they sure as hell aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on Flash if there really was a superior (or even comparable) solution available for free.
I'll tell you what: why don't you go off and write a nice, free authoring tool for SVG that is good enough for the Homestar guys to completely replace all those Strong Bad Emails with. (I will, of course, expect the final result needs to be just as bandwidth- and processor-efficient as Flash.) Until then, please, give it a rest.
(Disclaimer: I work for Macromedia (though not related to the Flash Lite effort in any way), so I expect to be ignored or dramatically modded down...)
Ok, quit the stupid Flash bashing allready. (Score:3, Insightful)
But nevertheless Flash is the most widespread professional rich media plattform. And it's a good one too.
The recent release of flash's PL ActionScript (V 2) has even has stepped on to a professional level with solid oop and error handling very simular to Java.
There are even serious OSS projects developing on it. Xical [xical.org] comes to mind as one.
So quit the flash bashing. There are flash sites that suck a lot. That's because every Idiot can grab a ripped Flash IDE and start clicking some crap together. Ok, I get that. But that doesn't mean Flash is bad. Just like bad Java apps won't make a bad java platform. Keep that in mind before you start ranting on what you don't know whoot about.
Re:Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the ads I bitch about, that's actually an appropriate application IMHO. It's lame ass sites like Ray-Ban's [rayban.com] where Flash is used as a replacement for HTML.
Especially when there's very little here that needed Flash, as in this case. Site-as-snazzy applet-thing should die a painful death.
Gimme a break (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not a fan of Macromedia one way or the other but gimme a break. Flash has not taken over anything. It is just one of many gimmicks used to make web sites (and now mobile sites) "flashier".
Perhaps Slashdot's ire might better be spent on ActiveX controls or those who coopt Javascript? Flash is a tempest in a teapot (though the headline is definitely an attention getter
Re:Who Needs Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is there a Flash editor/creator yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple is dying: sell stock now. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:forget flash, and svg sucks too (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What a bunch of (Score:4, Insightful)
Quit picking on Macromedia. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take Flash over the alternatives any day, thank you. And besides, the Flash format is openly documented [openswf.org]. What more could you want?
Re:SVG is so good how now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not on cell phones
Like hell. Converting SQL database queries to SVG is trivial with existing free tools. Converting anyone else's data to Flash is a major pain and requires that you give big sacks of cash to Macromedia for proprietary server-side tools.
The exact same thing can be said of SVG, especially with the new implementations on cell phones.
You're living in the past. SVG Tiny renders blazingly fast on the new cell phones that use it, and there are lots of great tools out there.
That's not a virtue on cell phones and other smart small devices, which is where the future is at.
Re:Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:2, Insightful)
- Flash interferes with most of the functions usually performed by a web browser: in-page searching, history, bookmarking, content filtering. If the blinky-flashy-advertising part of this huge flash monstrosity were a separate image, I could just choose to not display it. But because it's part of the same single giant spooge of "content", I have to just live with it, eh?
But more fundamentally, the burden of proof is not on those making the argument that Flash is vile and tainted. That burden rests on the shoulders of those who assert that Flash is vital and useful and worthwhile.Your feeble example of using flash to save a few reloaded bytes does not justify even all those endless extra bytes that flash interfaces use in the first place, much less the extensive array of tacky and ill-conceived things which are generally done with them. Flash would have to buy me a hell of a lot more than some faster edge-case refreshes for me to be willing to put my browsing at the mercy of every antisocial designer out there.
The best case is of imperceptible value, and the worst--and most common--case is astoundingly bad.
Re:Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. Flash belongs on the web, but is often misused. Your problems with Flash have nothing to do with the technology, but rather the way content authors have used it. It's like wanting to ban all music stations because Britney Spears is overplayed.
Re:Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so? (Score:5, Insightful)
An example of that last thing: stuff I access off the web is "untrusted content". Good window managers understand that as much as possible, the user (not the app) should be in control of the windows and the window location on the desktop. The same is true in the browser: the status line is for the user; the buttons are for the user. HTML and javascript goes crazy with allowing opening of new windows without status bars, without scrollbars (even when the client can detect that a scrollbar is needed anyway, most don't provide one if the code requested none), etc. See those dopey "vibrate your window" javascript apps. Flash can't do this; the flash application is sandboxed not in terms of disk, but in terms of screen real estate. Here you go; here's your client space. This has been a mess for years with javascript; w3c has sided with a "trust the author" paradigm with CSS, and browsers (e.g. Firefox) still don't sensibly override all of it (e.g. with needed scrollbars); whereas Flash picked a "safe" model from day one and hasn't changed it.
Don't even get me started (Score:2, Insightful)
OK so for my job I recently had to do a very simple clickthrough for some UI design work. I would have used straight HTML but I also needed to approximate some fancy UI thing. So even simple 'goto' statements didn't work like they were supposed to. The Flash ActionScript language is one of the most assinine things I've ever encoutered.
Meanwhile, Flash. What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin'! Well OK, funny animations like This Land [shockwave.com] are great. But most of the time it hinders me getting to the information that I need or want. Car sites are a prime example. Just show me the pictures and let me get to the specs easily!
The Web is primarily a tool for information--Flash has not proven itself to be a good information tool.
Re:Gosh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Their sole purpose seems to be to critize anyone who attempts to support SVG. They also have an obvious hatred for Macromedia that slants their arguments to the point of being absurd.
What they don't realize is that having well known companies like Macromedia adopt SVG is actually helping their cause.
The point of SVG is to provide declaritive, text based mark-up of engaging and interactive vector graphics. It's not rocket science. Flash has successfully produced such an experience for years and there's no harm in Macromedia trying to support SVG.
The fact that they didn't support such and such or didn't do everything perfect isn't the point. The main thing is whether customers will be successful with their offerings - if so, then case close and everyone gets richer.
For those who don't care about vector graphics then they shouldn't be reading articles about SVG or Flash - flames and attacks on these formats are out of place here, why not spend your time on something more productive?
Re:Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:2, Insightful)
But flash as a game development environment does not deserve the same treatment. Especially when it ends up on mobile devices. I can see a lot of interesting multi-player games evolving out of this. SMS based games like fudfite [fudfite.com] are going to be twice the fun.
As for being a waste of bandwidth. Yes, flash websites are, but flash games are certainly not. A game like Lightning Break [playaholics.com] is only just over 300k. Write something similar in SDL/PyGame and it's going to be a couple of meg's, minimum.
Yes, flash websites suck, but flash games do not. A lot of clever programmers are handling the limitations of Flash to come up with some good, optimised code that always loads fast.
Now, if they could just make Flash a bit more secure and a bit more web-aware, I'd be much happier.
Disclaimer: I work with Flash games daily on Chickstop [chickstop.com] and Playaholics [playaholics.com] so I'm quite biased I guess.
Re:Who Needs Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
The best explanation is that they are designing for aesthetics and/or gimmickry, and not usability.
For what it's worth, I don't mind the use of Flash for websites that are about image and novelty. What I find unacceptable is its (mis-)use in corporate websites that should be about professionalism and usability, when in fact we get some badly-designed Flash crap designed to look 'impressive' and bolster their image.
Actually, the image this projects is "this company is run by PHBs in thrall to superficiality".
Re:NIV (Score:3, Insightful)
This issue is more about source files, players, and output formats. The argument is that Macromedia doesn't want to make the best editor for a standard file format - they want to make a ubiquitous file format that they own, and crush others.