Slashdot Mirror
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.
"
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...)
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.