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. "

Comments

Who Needs Flash?

[Anomalous Canard]

Most Flash content I've seen is ads or novelties. I've found very few sites where Flash contributes anytihng to the site.

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.

Re:Who Needs Flash?

[Mprx]

Microscopic text (zoom is worthless here, fixed size page layout) and irritating animation is supposed to be an example of good use of Flash? Web pages are not supposed to look the same in all browsers. The text also can't be copied and pasted, and individual pages within the Flash can't be bookmarked. This site only illustrates why Flash sucks so bad.

Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so?

[mad.frog]

Yeah, it's a "trojan", but you say that like it's a bad thing.

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...)

Re:Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so?

[boomgopher]

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 not the ads I bitch about, that's actually an appropriate application IMHO. It's lame ass sites like Ray-Ban's 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.

Re:Well, of COURSE it's a trojan... so?

[nothings]

Yeah, I have to give Macromedia props on Flash. Bitching about ads or other abuses is insane; if there was some popular open source Flash-like thing, that would be getting equivalently abused. Flash is small, it works, and it's a lot better through than most "web standards".

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.

Re:SVG is so good how now?

[Hibernator]

Flash: Widely supported,

Not on cell phones

easy to use

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.

performance varies but is generally acceptable if the artist didn't go massivly nuts.

The exact same thing can be said of SVG, especially with the new implementations on cell phones.

SVG: Slow as hell no matter how fast your machine is, poor support, I /GUESS/ there is a tool set out there, but who in their right mind would want to use it?

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.

Flash and Shockwave are easy to install, frequently updated...

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...

[NanoGator]

"Flash is very cool technology. It simply does not belong on the web."

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.