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

"debunks Macromedia's marketing lies"

[Neil Blender]

Lies filled with bunk are the worst lies of all.

Gosh...

[Trillan]

For a so-called debunking, there's an awful lot of "Yes, this is true, but it doesn't tell the whole story" in the article. Quint's article reads like a panic attack waiting for a problem.

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.

Re:Who Needs Flash?

[88NoSoup4U88]

"Microscopic text (zoom is worthless here, fixed size page layout) and irritating animation is supposed to be an example of good use of Flash?"

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 ?

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

[obi]

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.

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 .as files, and would generate an SWF.

Flex is a bit like that, but it's not exactly there yet. And it's incredibly expensive.

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?

Ah Yes

[cubicledrone]

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.

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: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.

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: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.

Re:What a bunch of

[Phexro]

Using flash for video is stupid and wrong. Use MPEG-4, and stick it inline with an element.

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.