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

NIV

[Queer Boy]

Macromedia has an EXTREME case of non-invented-here that they have been fighting for YEARS. They are desperately trying to be Microsoft by locking people into their file formats, when they are late to market on abilities. Problem as I see it is that they don't realise their tools are wonderful and that's the reason to use Macromedia. Everything Director does can be done in QuickTime and was done in QuickTime BEFORE Director came out, it's just that the Director tool is so good.

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.

Re:NIV

[Monkelectric]

I use flash all the time, and I hate it. Its like software purgatory. The problem is consistancy -- sometimes there are context menus, sometimes there aren't. Sometimes not all an items options appear in the properties window. Some things that should be in a context menu can only be accessed while selecting an item and then going to a pull down menu. If flash would make proper use of context menus and straighten out their GUI, then yes flash would be a great program.

Is there a Flash editor/creator yet?

[Eberlin]

Is there a Flash Animation editor for Linux yet? I don't mean stuff that'll save to SWF like the drawing tool for OpenOffice or sodipodi. I'm talking about stuff that'll make animations, deal with actionscripting, and support embedded sounds.

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?

[fiannaFailMan]

Most javascript content I've seen is for annoying popup ads and popunders, especially from porn sites that make it almost impossible to clear your screen without quitting the browser. Scarcely a day goes by when I don't get irritated by at least one popup, and popunders are just evil. Who needs javascript?

And if it's Flash helping the content and functionality you want, go to www.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...

[rokzy]

(imo) flash is a bad technology because it fundamentally makes access to information difficult, once you have a flash based website there's no searching, selecting text, deep-linking etc.

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?

[CajunArson]

OK, so Macromedia makes a viewer for SVG but they have a preference for their own technololgy. That's like attacking OpenOffice for making a system that can read MS Word documents while encouraging its own document format. Right now Macromedia appears to have done a hell of a lot more to support SVG by making a viewer for it than all of OSS who talks about SVG all day long but I have yet to see a single OSS utility to employ SVG beyond a couple of gimmicky static images. So should we say that open source developers are trying to kill SVG??

Re:Ah Yes

[rzbx]

"They make the best web development tools in the business, period."

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?

[hackstraw]

Believe it or not, I don't need flash either. I've gone on rants here before about it and I think it still sucks. In fact, I disable ALL plugins by default, and only load them when I get a pretty much blank page and I'm for some reason, interested in the java or flash that they might have.

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? 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

[DNAspark99]

Anyone who has been checking out the latest developments by rasterman (enlightenment) may be aware of the upcoming 'edje' library, which appears to be quite promising for desktop, as well as embedded applications, phones, wonderapps and such.

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....

[gtshafted]

... that Flash is on the front page of Slashdot again

lately I've been hearing alot about this horrible upcoming MS thing called XAML - 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.
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/ development/
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashpro/ video/
http://www.macromedia.com/software/central/

Re:Cue the Flash-bashers...

[hackstraw]

Rebutal to your rebuttal:

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.

svg is...

[Sithgunner]

Since no one mentions it everytime, I'll paste what's significant about SVG I commneted a while ago on slashdot.
Sure flash works, is deployed in wider audience, but simply lacks the following stuff.

From what I understand, SVG is superior to flash because,

1. Not only human, but machines(web robots etc) can read information on graphical content of a web page if SVG is used, because the file is presented in a human readable file as xml text file, opposed to flash delivered in binary format which you can only know what it is by loading it on specific applications.

2. File size is notably smaller compared to images presented as a binary format, because the rules of the graphic/animation is written as a text file. Although if you embed an existing image file, that will make the entire SVG bigger than just lines of xml code, of course.

3. SVG is an open and standardized format, so many applications may adopt the format(Editor, viewer, converter etc).

4. After all, it's XML :) Interoperability, it has.

Re:What a bunch of

[fiannaFailMan]

I'm not sure what you mean by "XML parsing (last time I checked SVG couldn't do that in its authoring tool)"--what is the SVG authoring tool? Sodipodi or such?

In the Flash authoring tool you can use ActionScript to parse XML data from external sources and display it in the swf where the user can then be allowed to manipulated it at his heart's content. If additional data is needed by the user, the swf can ask for an additional stream of data to be parsed in without having to destroy the page and re-load the whole thing from scratch. This is one of the main benefits of Flash, not animations. Unfortunately it seems to be very hard to get this message heard here, a lot of people seem to have already made their minds up about Flash because it's a proprietary standard and are digging around for any excuse to denounce it, even blaming the technology for any abuses that Flash developers come up with. It's a bit like denouncing C because that's what viruses are written in.

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.

For video--& if you're using Flash as the comparison, I guess you mean synchronized sound and animation

No, I do mean video.

SWF is NOT an open specification!

[rillian]

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 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?

[u02sgb]

Personally I object to things like not being able to mute the sound. You have a "right click" menu with settings. Why isn't "Disable sound" one of them? I don't want a full volume bleep noise every time an advert pops up to tell me it's there. Despite it being requested regularly (do a google search for Flash disable.sound) it still hasn't been included.

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.

[Robotron2084]

Bah. I usually agree that the open source format is the preferred format. But having worked with the flash swf file format and having seen SVG in action, I'll go with flash. Its not even worth trying SVG, SVG Tiny, or any variant.

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.