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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NIV (Score:5, Interesting)
If they would just realise people would use their products to create QuickTime/SVG over Director/Shockwave, they would be OK.
Macromedia has never been a first to market company, they just create great tools.
Is there a Flash editor/creator yet? (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems a natural progression from the projects that are creating libraries to be able to do such things. Is it ming? I don't remember.
I know the whole "Flash Sucks" thing and the "Macromedia is evil" thing but there are uses for it in one form or another..especially for artsy/multimedia-based projects. Are there any Open Source projects out there that can substitute for Flash MX or will WINE still be the only way to get through?
Re:Who Needs Flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
And if it's Flash helping the content and functionality you want, go to www.broadmoor.com [broadmoor.com] and click 'reservations.' Show me a _single_ web technology that can do all of that without having to combine ten other technologies and looking the same in all browsers.
Re:Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:5, Interesting)
it also wastes bandwidth and client resources.
if it weren't for Flashblock, flash would be a far greater annoyance/hinderence to me than even spam.
Uh... when will OSS support SVG for real? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ah Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
They have the best known throughout most of the world tools for their purpose, but that does not make them the best necessarily. Btw, who is to say they will continue making such "great" software? A business has no interest in progress unless they have no choice. Business-wise, they are what Microsoft is. They sell software. The internet is leaning the business world toward services, not sale of software. Any company that resists this is going to be up against a lot of pressure. This pressure exists everywhere, from end users that don't want to pay over and over to "upgrade" their product, to the large corporations that wish to lower their TCO. One can argue all they want about software as a "shrink wrapped" product all they want, but it doesn't change what is happening. Macromedia is going to be up against some very stiff competition. What keeps them alive is interesting in a way. They have a large user base for starters. They offered what people wanted at the time and quickly took control over a nice piece of the market. They exist because just like the MS Windows OS, people are stuck with it. There are many flash sites. They are not exactly a standard, they are simply popular. When people say standard, they generally talk about a technology that is NOT controlled by one company. A standard is agreed upon and used througout the world by many. Flash is simply a "popular" (depends on how you define popular too) technology being used by many, in many cases forcefully(not physically, etc. don't twist what I say please).
Re:Who Needs Flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that all plugins are evil for browsers. Back in the damned plugin craze of the mid to late 90's that sucked. Every site had their own cute plugin that you had to install. Ha! Remember VRML [vrmlsite.com]? Havn't seen that in a while, and that was pretty cool as far as eye candy goes.
I especially don't like the new standards that people are working on for plugins in browsers. I see this as a possible reinvention of the plugin craze (probably the new form of spyware).
Now that I've bashed plugins and flash in general, I will have to say that flash is actually a cool multimedia toy. Its fairly easy to do really cool animations, games, etc. I'm shocked that flash has not made itself a pluginable thing via APIs as eye candy for windows apps. Instead of a silly dll animation, why not have a cooler flash one? You could have flash splash screens, etc.
But as far as the web goes, flash is unnecessary, and it (and all plugins) are in my opinion unwanted. I think that the fact that there are really only 2 plugins left that are commonly used (flash and java) says that the "market" does not want plugins. Java is hardly used anymore at all, and 99% of the time flash is used for ads. And they are the most annoying adds. They do not stop cycling like GIFs (doesn't your webbrowser stop them after 1 cycle?) They have the utter annoying feature that they sieze my keyboard input while I'm navigating a webpage via keyboard.
Summary: tech good, tech in browser bad
forget flash, and svg sucks too (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/systems.html
"Edje is one of the more unique parts of EFL, combining many things that Shockwave / FLASH can do with some things it can't, but instead of being designed as a player, it is designed as a slave library to be used by an application to enhance the applications content and display via external compressed data files. It is being expanded continuously, and thanks to its clean design is easy to improve."
Something to keep an eye on for sure!
It's about time.... (Score:3, Interesting)
lately I've been hearing alot about this horrible upcoming MS thing called XAML [xaml.net] - and (quoting a nameless slashdotter) how it's akin to VB crack for its power and ease of use.
I could be wrong, but I think many people have overlooked that the kind of pervasive scary crap is already here, and it has been here for awhile now./ development/ [macromedia.com]
/ video/ [macromedia.com]
While I love Java and use it heavily, I admit that Flash is more ubiquitious it runs on almost every major OS and browser. Delivers more on the write once run anywhere.
-Flash is extremely fast and easy to install. it's literally point and click. I don't even think the player is even a 1mb...
-Flash is extremely easy to learn and use: my female, graphic designer cousin who hates anything "technical and dorky" makes flash apps all the time; hell most of flash dev is visual drag and drop
-Flash is getting more powerful by the minute: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashpro
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashpro
http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/ [macromedia.com]
Re:Cue the Flash-bashers... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Flash is bad because it is used for annoying animations that get in the way of website usability.
It is. Who wants to be annoyed? Your rebuttal says The web is full of websites that have annoying popup and popunder ads. I don't know what your talking about. I havn't seen a popup/under in 3 years. Who puts up with that today? Being that I don't load flash by default, and only do enable it by morbid curiosity. I can't think of a website that "requires" it. Oh, and the flash/javascript comparison. I don;t like javascript either, but I do enable it because it does seem to be required today. And the javascript popup/under thing is very fixed.
2) Flash is bad because it springs music on people without warning.
That is bad. So is any other technology that plays music on a website. I love music, but its annoying an unapropriate on a webpage.
3) It hogs the processor.
Yes it does, and that sucks. I use a laptop 99% of the time, and if I don't have to have my fan turn on or my battery run low because you want to get my attention and buy something from you, thats fine by me.
Flash is very cool technology. It simply does not belong on the web. I can download and run the flash in a helper app if need be for a game or something, but don't inline it with my html. Thanks.
Re:NIV (Score:4, Interesting)
svg is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure flash works, is deployed in wider audience, but simply lacks the following stuff.
Re:What a bunch of (Score:3, Interesting)
You can use a text editor to develop swf files too in the same way that you talk about developing svg, but the Flash authoring tool is a lot more powerful.
No, I do mean video.SWF is NOT an open specification! (Score:3, Interesting)
Flash is an open SPECIFICATION, meaning Macromedia will tell you how to read and write them. IT IS NOT AN OPEN FORMAT.
If only. Then it would be no worse than PDF. Have you ever read the license terms [macromedia.com] associated with the published specification? They specifically restrict you to generation and disallow playback implementations. So, no open source flash player. That's not even an open specification, that's just the same sad old we-must-control-things mindset that open source has been fighting since the beginning.
Some of the open source work that's been done has been based on reverse-engineering, but really, just use SVG. It's a real pity too. Flash (the technology, not what it's usually used for) is quite useful and well implemented to boot. Just another case of routing around the damage.
Re:Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so? (Score:2, Interesting)
It just strikes of product that's had design compromises from a marketing department ("Look at the control you have over the users browser with Flash").
The SVG Format is unfeasible. (Score:2, Interesting)
The 'interactivity' aspect of SVG is laughable. It's on par with Flash v2, which basically gives it just enough interactivity to make it positively annoying, but not at all useful. Give SVG forms(XForms would be nice) and it might be more approachable. It sickens me to think that everyone likes to complain about Flash being annoying, but then support an even more annoying format just because its open source.
There's too much XML bloat within SVG to make it of much use. A flash rectangle is 9 bytes. SVG's is about 40. A flash matrix record is about 5 bytes, SVG's is at least 5 times that. These are basic atomic units used hundreds if not thousands of times throughout a file.
Plus the SVG parser has to compile to an internal vector engine. Flash is already compiled to HIGHLY optimized bytecode.
There's no way I'm going to use hundreds of bytes to describe just one shape. And then waste precious cell phone processing power to parse the xml into an internal format.
If anything, there should be an intermediate bytecode format determined by the W3C to allow for compiled SVGTiny.