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Macromedia: More FUD About SVG
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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Summary:
"Macromedia must be lying because they make Flash and we all hate Flash because someone used it for a banner ad."
No matter what play on words and rewrite of definitions Macromedia folks can come up with, Flash Lite is not standard.
Macromedia Flash is standard, whether "Flash Lite" is or isn't. There are thousands of Flash developers and hundreds of millions of Flash player installations. Flash MX managed to accomplish what no other platform has: cross-platform web multimedia with a WORKING AUTHORING APPLICATION and a WORKING PLAYER at the SAME TIME.
Just because Macromedia is making money doesn't make everything they say FUD. They make the best web development tools in the business, period. They don't have to support open standards, but they are supporting SVG, and Fireworks+Flash have the best commercial support for PNG on the market. These are good things(tm). The anti-Macromedia-because-they-make-Flash thing is getting REALLY old.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I don't agree. They've often tried to use existing languages/techniques for flash. Examples: they were probably one of the first to use the new ecmascript 4 in a major product. They could've rolled their own language, but they picked something familiar, and kept up to date with it. I hear the format they use for Flex is based on Mozilla's XUL. And their Flash VM (the plugin) is really quite good.
.as files, and would generate an SWF.
Now, as someone who has to use the tools quite often, I absolutely HATE Flash MX. It's buggy, bloated, the code editor sucks, FLA files aren't really portable, it crashes often, and it slows you down all the time (crap usability).
I wish I had a compiler that would take some XML files for graphics (a subset of SVG maybe?) and some
Flex is a bit like that, but it's not exactly there yet. And it's incredibly expensive.
Irritating animation , nope, that's no good example of Flash : Trying to add to one's experience of going to a certain website (for instance , a game site) is better achieved with Flash, than with a clean html site with some cool MIDI song underneath it :P
"The text also can't be copied and pasted"
Depends on what kind of text the designer uses : It is perfectly possible to have text selections within Flash documents.
"Web pages are not supposed to look the same in all browsers"
Ohwait, now we -aren't- looking for uniformity in browsers anymore ? What did I miss ?
", and individual pages within the Flash can't be bookmarked"
Again, this would be a design choice of the webdesigner.
"This site only illustrates why Flash sucks so bad."
Then why haven't you started using some sort of Flashblock extension yet ?