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HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash?
superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"
But as someone who's thrown together more than a few web applications in my time, I'd like to talk to you about what I'm really excited about--the datagrid element.
Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is <table>. Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!
When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page? Hell, it's almost always the next thing to follow <body> on my pages. And you know the code I write to interact dynamically with that table is a bitch. An unmaintainable mess. Yeah, there's probably some library out there I could use to simplify that pain but it always comes down to me messing around with advanced Javascript code trying to squeeze some more functionality into the user's interaction with that table. "Oh, I want this box to highlight red when this happens!" a user might say. Everyone wants a "simple table" with Google Spreadsheets functionality.
So we switched a whole project to Flex once. Yeah, Flex. Free right? Not if you want the datagrid!
Advanced DataGrid component -- The Advanced DataGrid is a new component that adds commonly requested features to the DataGrid such as support for hierarchical data, and basic pivot table functionality. Available only with Flex Builder Professional.
Need to fork over cash for that gem. Oh, you can drone on and on about "vendor lock in" and "hidden costs" with Flash. Don't matter. Customer is king.
My only hope is that HTML 5 presents a competitive datagrid with pivot table functionality. From their specs:
The datagrid element represents an interactive representation of tree, list, or tabular data.
HTML 5, I await you with open arms, hope and understanding. Improve the table element (if possible) and create a solid datagrid element. Deliver me from Flash.
My work here is dung.
Kill flash. Kill it stone cold dead.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
More options is always a good thing.
But I can't imagine HTML 5 being capable of something like this.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
"I like Adobe â" they're a nice company,"
Has he actually used any of their stuff? Apparently not. Also, according to my friend who works in a Flash coding shop, they can real pricks occassionally.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
<first post />
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
How long until HTML 5 is supported in every browser?
The "good" thing about Flash is that it is a plug in. Flash can be added to just about every browser by downloading a plug in.
HTML 5 will take a lot longer to get into every browser.
I really don't like Flash or plug-ins but in this case it is an advantage and will be for a long time to come.
Oh and NOBODY except Slashdot will write to a standard that IE doesn't support.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Link requires Flash plugin, it crashed my toaster.
The article doesn't say html 5 will have some sort of mechanism in place to manipulate and display vector art. Until that happens, Flash will be king for the sort of content that relies on vectors as opposed to rasters/bitmaps.
We were just thinking that, if you were to hold off on implementation of HTML 5 in MSIE, we might, uh, contribute to your re-election campaign.
Sincerely,
Adobe
In current days, Flash is only used to:
- Casual games;
- Boring add banners, like "hit the monkey";
- Video players;
- Webpages menus, when the designer has no know-how to use CSS/Javascript.
Excluding games, all uses can be replaced by web-standards (even videos, in next-generation browsers).
"But I can't imagine HTML 5 being capable of something like this"
Nor should it be. That's like saying my car should be able to traverse water too. There are tools for crossing water and tools for crossing land - and they are usually different.
But for simple "Here's a video of my cat yodeling" or "here's a sample of the music file you are about to download" you SHOULDN'T need a plug-in any more than you need a plug-in to view a picture (with apologies to the Lynx users among us).
However: there is no way HTML5 will replace Flash even for those sorts of applications until a large enough set of installed browsers can properly handle HTML5 that webmasters can safely ignore the hold-outs - and even if a large meteor were to strike a certain city in the American northwest that installed base will be quite some time in coming. Flash already has that installed base (modulo the iPhone and a few embedded devices).
Now, if you can make it such that HTML5 can be used to ram annoying advertising down our throats while denying us the ability to save the content we WANT to save - well then, I predict adoption to be swift and sure.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Opera preaches standards left and right, but the real problem is nobody follows then except Opera. Therefore Opera doesn't work like all the other browsers. I love Opera for the most part and I use two browsers all the time. I would only use Opera, except for the fact that so many websites don't function properly in Opera. (Mostly javascript and css are the issue)
Once Opera functions like all other browsers, I will listen to what Jon has to say.
I'd like to talk to you about what I'm really excited about--the datagrid element.
I'm disappointed. I read that as the datagirl element, and I figured the link would take me to some lady's web design howto page, filled with examples, essays, rants, etc.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.
It supports charting, animations, and rich media. Version 1.5 is rumoured to have support for complex form controls, just like Flex.
What's more, it's totally integrated into the Java Virtual Machine, meaning it can use all of the Java class libraries. It even has a mobile component, meaning it's possible to port applications between the desktop and supporting mobile platforms.
To me, this single runtime sounds like a much better alternative that the kludge that is HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX support a multitude of IE6/IE7/IE8/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browser runtimes, especially if there's no framework behind them.
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"In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash."
I can't tell you how many times I've come across a site which uses Flash to show a single, individual picture. Not a stream of pictures. Not a mosaic of pictures. Not a slideshow of pictures. One picture.
WTF? You're telling me it's easier to code a Flash object to display that one picture than it is to throw in a link to the picture? Seriously?
Then you have those sites which insist on having their front page as Flash-only. Brilliant. Just brilliant. How the hell am I supposed to find anything on your site if there is no way to save that link for future reference?
Flash is ugly, slow and just plain annoying. Almost as annoying as punch the monkey. Web designers who rely on Flash to do their work should have their knuckles pounded with a five pound cast-iron doorstop dropped from a height of ten feet then made to punch a punching bag.
Hopefully HTML 5 will cure the web of this illness.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
With IE down to 65% or so, 20% of that being IE 6 users, and dropping at 5%/year the days of IE support being a necessity may be numbered.
If it's not viable it's not an alternative.
HTML5 has a lot of potential, but adoption above and beyond Flash (or Silverlight, etc...) will depend on 2 factors:
1. Implementation Penetration
2. Authoring Tools
Flash's strength is in the tools more than the language(s), Actionscript and MXML. For every 1 Flash "programmer" I meet, I know about 10 people who know Flash well enough to make graphics and simple script work on the time line.
If a majority of the browser users have HTML5 support, and a killer app exists for editing content; I would then put weight towards the possibility of HTML5 trumping Flash.
Dude, I hardly ever use tables for layout. I'm not religious about it: now and then it's the practical choice. But such cases are few and far between. My blog, my development pages, my research - table free. Why? As you said, they add complexity: with all those tags they're a pain to implement and maintain.
If you learn enough CSS, most tables just melt away. Sometimes CSS is the pits and I wonder at the twisted minds that came up with the W3C box model. But usually, it's awesome. Often when using OpenOffice I wish I could drop down into CSS. Not infrequently, the formatting I want is a snap in CSS - but impossible in OO.
As for HTML, you know what I use most? Paragraph tags. And lists. Lots and lots of lists.
I kiid, kiid. I like Adobe -- they're a nice company... for me to poop on!
</triumph>
We've always been able to embed videos in web pages. The reason places started embedding them in flash was to make it more difficult to save/view the videos without loading up the whole page and/or to let them force ads before or after the video. And partly just because flash web "design" people only have one hammer so every problem looks like a nail.
Why not just get in line over there, behind Silverlight, GoLive, and the rest of the systems that were going to 'kill flash'.
Flashblock to the rescue right now.
If they make aggravating crap out of of standard HTML, then it will likely be harder to shut down.
Most sites are developed for IE6 compatibility nowadays. With that in mind, I can't imagine the industry widely accepting this within the next 5 years.
I'd rather they create a tag to help ensure that stuff is off between the enclosing tags. This will help a lot for security.
The way HTML is currently is like a car with hundreds of "Go" buttons, but not a single "Stop" button. To stop, you have to make sure all the "Go" buttons are not pressed. Worse, once you figured out how to disable/escape all the "Go" buttons, the W3C or some browser maker creates a new bunch of "Go" tags...
Example of how the tag could work:
<guard sig="randomhardtoguessstringhere" allowonly="safehtml">
all active stuff disabled here, only "safehtml" - a subset of HTML allowed.
</guard sig="hacker's failed attempt to break out">
active stuff still disabled here
</guard sig="randomhardtoguessstringhere">
active stuff re-enabled.
This sort of thing is helpful for sites that need to display 3rd party content (for example webmail). While they still should disable all the "Go" tags, this allows them to add a second layer of protection in case something slips through.
It also helps if in the future there is HTML7 and there's a new unsafe tag or feature introduced that they and their escaping libs are unaware of.
It's unlikely Internet Explorer will die any time soon. So unless the Microsoft developers somehow magically start putting together a browser that is current in support of web standards, Flash and its brethren will never die. It doesn't matter how great the HTML5 support is in Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit (Chrome, Safari) - as long as IE continues to lag, we're stuck ("we" meaning those of us who code pages for the real world).
#DeleteChrome
Isn't this was SMIL was supposed to deliver? Is that dead now?
God Fucking Damnit
Flash is Flash. Period. If your Flash file works in IE, it works in FF, Opera, Safari, etc. It requires a plugin sure, but it's one that's almost universally adopted.
By comparison just about everything else is developed in 2 phases:
1. Write standards-compliant code that's well-formatted and works properly.
2. Fix about 37,000 IE-only bugs, knowing that ~70% of your users are going to be viewing your site with that piece of crap. Additional time is required because IE6 and 7 aren't even consistent with each other in terms of how they piss on the standards. This is especially true with CSS, which IE is absolutely terrible with.
I welcome HTML 5, as I think it has a lot of nice improvements, as well as a lot of stuff that should've been there years ago. We just have to pray that browser support - especially from MS - actually allows us to USE the new features on a regular basis.
Also, one side note: Even assuming Flash is no longer used AT ALL for layouts or content delivery (and I hope it isn't), Flash movies and games will of course continue to exist... so Flash isn't going to die as some are saying, it'll simply be used for what it was actually designed for - creating animations and games.
I can remember tinkering with it back in the early days. Of course, it was just a vector-based web animation tool at that time. Building flash animations and seeing what people could accomplish with this amazing tool was fun and entertaining.
Now, I just want it to die a horrible, horrible death. Browser focus-stealing advertisements, poor support on consoles like the wii and ps3, complete lack of support on certain portable devices, an awful video interface that suffers from performance issues... what the hell happened?
Flash has gone from a purpose-built vector graphics program, to a plague upon the www. Please kill it.
I work at a web development company, and we are already starting to move away from flash and relying more and more heavily on javascript. The motivation is mostly because:
a) the flash development tools are inferior to javascript ones
b) every web programmer knows at least basic javascript, many don't know any flash. Easier to build on basic js than train someone in flash from scratch
c) the flash development tools cost a fortune, the javascript ones are either free or very afordable
In fact, just yesterday I wrote a javascript replacement for a flash script which we use on many of our websites. (a general purpose loop of photos, with animated transitions). The javascript alternative is smaller, faster to load, *smoother animated in most browsers*, and easier to maintain or improve on in future.
We're also planning to do the same for other flash scripts in our code library.
Even when we do still use flash, it's in smaller ways. We will virtually never build an entire page (let alone website) with flash, instead we'll do the website in html and then embed a tiny piece of flash.
For example, a photo gallery will be pure html/javascript right up until the point where you click the "full screen" button. And even then, the flash doesn't exist in the page until you click that button, it is injected into the page and configured using javascript.
There are still some places where we need flash: video, full screen, and proper file uploads. Video will be the next to drop off the list, pretty soon we'll be doing video in javascript/html, with flash loaded in as a fallback in browsers that can't do video in html.
Sigh. I really hope that HTML5 is somewhat similar to xhtml. I really do believe it went in the right direction in general. Even with xhtml strict pages not displaying at all if they had some unclosed tags. It all in general was working toward having authors writing better, more interpolatable pages.
Is xhtml dead? Will the applicable changes in html5 make it back to xhtml? I get the feeling that MS never implemented xhtml strict because they didn't want to drop the ability to extend it.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I can't decide whether your post should be wrapped in <sarcasm> tags or not. Absolutely everything you have said goes against modern HTML/CSS/JS best practices. The table element should only be used for displaying... wait for it... tabular data!
Also, why would you think Flex was free when there are clearly marked "Buy Now" links all over the Adobe product page? Yes there is a free SDK available, but anybody with any sense at all would know that Adobe is a company that makes money. I just don't know why you switched your whole project over to Flex when you hadn't even spent more than 5 minutes researching it.
I'd like to know the name of the company you work for so that I can know to steer clear.
I'm sure that there will not be any cross-browser issues with HTML 5.
Thats the beauty of Flash. If you have the plug-in, you know exactly how it will look on the users computer.
You don't have to support IE?
Corporate intranet. The organization is 80% Firefox, 10% Chrome, and 10% Mobile Safari.
he does have to hand code his pages using emacs.
You just think he's hand-coding his pages. He's really using a website revision system (what's that?) written partly in Emacs Lisp.
You mean it's not my imagination? IAMAWD either. Just another blended-geek who pokes at computers. I have a cute little site I tinker with with a 2-layer table. I mostly understand it if I don't get too fancy.
I took a couple of looks at CSS and went "huh?". CSS may be superior at an advanced level, but tiny tables are easier, apparently for the two of us, to just post up and be done with.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Mods, you can bite me. I can't believe that there are Flash Fanbois at Slashdot. This place has gone to hell.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Why would I want your Klingon for a datagrid element? ;)
Come on folks, let's be a bit realistic here. It's been what, nigh a decade, and we still do not have browsers properly rendering stuff as simple as tables and positioning using CSS, DOM, etc.
And while granted that HTML5 may provide a nice alternative for embedding video and audio. If that's all you think Flash is for, than you've never done more than scratch the surface.
Check out Flex, AIR, and some of the 3D libraries for Flash. Experiment with remoting. See what you can REALLY do in Flash.
Check out Sliderocket for an example, or Aviary.
This discussion is so retro-ish, well, it hurts, to say the least. I feel being suspended in a time-machine.
First, as a correction to my parent, who got things at least partly right:
Firstly, CSS can't be formatted, since it is THE formatting language. The presentation of (X)HTML can be formatted via CSS. But I regard this as being just a minor faux pas.
Secondly, and more importantly, designing with CSS has nothing whatsoever to do with <div> & <span> elements. You can format a table cell just like a div, a span, a p, an a, an h1, an img (for the more retarded, yes, there is a display property with values such as block, inline, inline-block, table, table-cell, and many, many more).
As to some of the other commenters: The cross-browser difficulties with CSS are mostly over if you don't have IE6 in mind. Therefore, for most applications table layout generates far more problems than it solves, its days are definitely over! Wake up!
JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.
Then you should be pleased about about Moonlight:
http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
Interoperable GPL'ed implementation of Silverlight, based on Mono.
They've got full Silverlight 1.0 compatibility, much of Silverlight 2, and even some features from Silveright 3 (which is still in beta).
http://www.mono-project.com/MoonlightRoadmap
My video compression blog
Ideally, you wouldn't be doing this on standard web pages. However, if must, you should be able to use CSS absolute positioning.
See:
http://phrogz.net/CSS/vertical-align/index.html
http://www.jakpsatweb.cz/css/css-vertical-center-solution.html
The reason flash is so popular is because many people can use it to express themselves. I actually use it for design work that is not on-line related at all! People actually laugh when I tell them because they think i'm joking, but they only limit themselves to "it's for online animation."
:P
While I agree that flash at many points was over used and abused, it does have its merits. Unfortunately now a days even my 3ghz P4 isn't enough to quickly handle all the flash that is thrown at it, and that's disappointing. So something has to be done.
If another technology emerges that can truly replace it for the professionals, then so be it. But for amateur hour it's still one of the best resources out there.
With out it, we would never had had all your base are belong to us, stickfu and all the random crap i've created over the years including cheesy/cool xmas greetings and valentine "cards" (all with stolen source images).
But don't worry, adobe sucks and they'll kill it themselves soon enough.
Oh and I almost forgot, i am surprised no one ever figured out how to spread viruses through it, while doing some stuff for personal sites i came across some interesting code that could allow such a thing in a very easy way. But hopefully since then, it's been fixed. Since flash 5 though they've started to add a lot more security to prevent such things which is a good thing. ActionScript is no perl, but it's still bad ass!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
It's skewed logic to say "Let's replace flash with javascript and html 5." They're different beasts, for a variety of reasons.
Flash is more strictly sandboxed than js. That's a good thing when the flash app is someone's ad, but possibly a bad thing if you want to write a web app.
Flash was specifically designed so that it could be used for games. Javascript wasn't. It is possible to write games in js, but I really doubt that you'll be able to do really fancy games in js+html 5 any time soon.
Flash is less proprietary than it used to be. Part of its remaining proprietary nature is because Adobe wants to make sure there's no other first-class toolchain for developing flash. But part of the reason it's proprietary is that it's encumbered by a ton of patents, which Adobe doesn't even own. Doing things using html 5 doesn't magically cure all the patent issues. The audio part of the html 5 standard doesn't require browsers to implement any patent-free codec, so web developers will still have to use mp3. The situation is even worse for video codecs. There are open-source flash players (gnash) and development toolchains (haxe), but there are serious legal obstacles preventing them from becoming plug-in replacement for Adobe's proprietary tools. Not only do we have the patent issues, but Adobe has tons of libraries that flash developers have become dependent on. Those libraries are all totally proprietary, and Adobe has very carefully set their licenses up so that there's no way to obtain the API docs and write a competing tool.
Find free books.
Ah, I hate CSS. But I took a hard nose dive into it and sort of got the hang of it. I understood it well enough to be somewhat dangerous with it. Still, I think tables are much easier to design with. Maintaining them? Not so much.
One thing that always bothered me is the line "tables are for tabular data". It's sort of a confusing statement at first glance. How exactly do you define data that doesn't belong in a table? If people just simply had left it as, "tables are not meant to be used in formatting", a lot less people would be confused.
If anyone is still confused about the tabular data thing, just think of what you'd put into a spreadsheet. If the data you're typing wouldn't go in a spreadsheet, why would you put it into a table?
I have no idea what that first link is supposed to do, it just sits there for me and looks like a jumbled mess. I enabled scripts there with noscript, reloaded..still just a mess. Clicked all the buttons..nothing. FF 3.0.10 on linux. I notice it says you need some beta of FF, which I don't have, but perhaps if you could give a short summary of what it is supposed to do for those of us on differing browsers, what the coolness factor is? Thanks in advance.
I guess such designers don't know user s can take a screenshot of a single image flash?
Or do they disable the keyboard and [ctrl]+[prtsc] too?
I'm really into flash as I'm a designer though I've found pretty helpful tools on HTML, hope HTML5 bring more.
Craig Miller
html web design
Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is . Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!
Tables in html are not for layouts, which is you're doing, they are for data. Sure people have been doing that since tables came along. Among other things using tables for layout is a bitch for visually impaired people. Evolt does have a tutorial on how to build accessible tables though. CSS is what's supposed to be used for layouts, and it's faster. A List Apart has some good articles on how to use CSS for layouts
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Falcon
Should there be a Law?
At the end of the day, on most websites, the thing that matters IS the presentation (otherwise the only tags we'd need were h, a, and p). If you can't align one image correctly next to another one, then that is a problem. If you have to sacrifice your design vision at all, then that is a failure of the system.
I'm a photographer and want to start my own photography business, which is not very likely in today's economy, and I've studied a bunch of photographers' websites. Though not all it seems many get along with good layouts using CSS and not tables.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Through a screen reader, maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.
You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly.
I'd be pretty surprised if screen readers simply and universally fail when they encounter tables that are used for layout. Many of them have existed for a long time, certainly back into the 1990s, and not being able to handle table layouts would have rendered them useless for most of the web for a long time. And while making distinctions between data and layout uses for tables may not be purely deterministic, it's hardly an intractable problem. Something as simple as Lynx has been able to make some distinctions since 1999, well enough that most of the web turns out to accessible using it. I can't believe there aren't screen readers who can't do at least that well.
And if you can do that, what you mostly get without the layout table is generally a source-ordered linear reading of page sections corresponding to table cell... just like you'd get with any other document without repurposed table markup, albeit with sections determined by other tags. CSS gives you some flexibility in terms visual layouts you can create that aren't tied to the source order, which is nice, but it's hardly a disaster not to have this.
My own observation is that it's other things that present real obstacles to page accessibility/semantics: navigation that's only visible via flash or javascript, images or other media without fallback text, abuse of HTML entities, lack of access keys. Table layout? Not so much.
Tweet, tweet.
Great. Now I won't be able to suppress the noisy and annoying (especially in a work environment) rich ad content by just disabling Flash.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Yeah, but can it do this?
http://www.nextcdn.com/Silverlight.htm
HTML5 is very much a media techology built like a web browser. But while the presentation layer is important, it only part of what makes a good media experience.
Smooth Streaming is dynamically and seamlessly between multiple bitrates based on real-time measurements of bandwidth, availble CPU, and window size. And it requires a decoder architecture like MediaStreamSource where demuxing happens in the sandbox, with decoders that can take appended sequences of raw audio and video samples.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.media.mediastreamsource_members(VS.95).aspx
http://alexzambelli.com/blog/2009/02/10/smooth-streaming-architecture/
Flash has something somewhat similar with Dynamic Streaming.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/dynstream_advanced_pt1_04.html
The key thing about a runtime like Silverlight or Flash is that the bytecode engine, decoders, and rendering layer are tightly coupled, and so can make assumptions about how long it takes a video sample to get from networking stack to demuxer to decoder to rendering engine to screen. It's complex stuff, and it's hard to see HTML5 specified tightly enough to make that kind of thing feasible.
For another extreme, there's the Raw AV pipeline: video and audio decoders running inside the managed code sandbox. Javascript is getting faster, sure, but it's a long way from being THAT fast.
Or to look at it another way, it'd be easier to support HTML5 in Silverlight than it would be to replace Silverlight with HTML5.
My video compression blog
quite frankly it is so much easier to use tables and the results are so much more consistent, provided you know what you are doing that for me at least,
The same applies to CSS, if you know what you're doing CSS is or consistent and easier.
You may like absolute positioning and all that, I am quite comfortable in tables and can usually visualize even a complex layout entirely in my head when its tables. To each their own.
Try to see, er hear, how a complex table layout sounds in an aural browser. Even simple tables can be messed up. And what if the browser window size is changed?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If only MS would add support for SVG and CANVAS. Take a look at this comparison chart: :)
http://www.naxos-software.de/blog/index.php?/archives/45-Interactive-Cross-Browser-Vector-Graphics-on-Top-of-SVG,-VML,-Canvas,-Silverlight-using-Dojos-GFX.html
But MS is rather going for Silverlight as their answer to Flash. Just like that ASP.NET was MS's answer to the internet (it was not working).
As of today Flash does the job while Silverlight might in a couple of years if ever.
Never the less having to rely on third party plugins always sucks.
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However thanks to initiatives like dojo gfx and others. It is possible to have drawing capabilities with DHTML and pure javascript.
The approach is to wrap the current browsers supported drawing API like SVG, CANVAS or VML. Check the link below. See the Link section in above link.
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A primitive but practical approach to get (simple) drawing capabilities is making your own drawing library that paints using the good old div tag.
I know that it sounds ridiculous, but Walter Zorn have made a quite useful library, that some use for charts, diagrams, rounded corners etc. See below link.
http://www.walterzorn.com/jsgraphics/jsgraphics_e.htm#performance
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It would be nice if all the browser vendors would sit down and agree on a very simple drawing API, that would make it possible to draw polygons and primitives and do translations in a cross browser environment.
And then compete on the more advanced plugins for those who need it (the add business who makes annoying banners).
Right now the most experienced and stubborn developers can get around without having to bother with plugins by hacking their own libraries or using open-source alternatives.
Over time libraries like dojo gfx will translate into new standard gfx API's that I guess will help MS to join the rest of the world and become part of the internet.
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Someone please try to talk some sense into MS next time you meet
Just tell them that they are losing the internet battle.
Funny is, if you can't go with standards and you are in hurry... Lets say your user profile is 99% Flash having and you can't test every browser... You will make the site in Flash :)
That time, all you would need is browser embedding Flash content right. Everyone including Opera users will see and use exact same thing.
I am not blaming Adobe or Flash of course, it is the standards bodies and browser vendors/scene who forced everyone to use Flash. Personally, I'd prefer to embed Quicktime or Real content but in reality, there is no way I will make the users install both. Especially Windows users. It will be same deal with HTML 5 if MS doesn't implement it to IE and somehow convince users to update. If it is the same MS I know since 1980s, there is no way. Especially after they sunk (b)millions to Silverlight joke.
How will I filter out annoying ads without FlashBlock?!?!
A lot of people start new businesses in recessions. It's often a good opportunity because people are looking for change, whereas when everything is going alright, they aren't interested in changing from what they already have.
Perhaps I should of included a smiley ;-). Actually in a lot of cases starting a business in an economic slowdown or recession is the best tyme to do it.
Also, my comment that you are replying to wasn't addressing CSS vs Tables, but rather the general failure of CSS to fulfill the promise of content separated from layout.
Okay. I think the failure to code layout with tables not CSS is for two reasons. One is developers and the other is the browsers. Developers, like most people, tend to stick with what they're comfortable with. However the browsers are getting better.
Of course it's easy for me to complain and point my fingers, I don't design websites. I used to but haven't in years. However as I said in the post you replied to I want to start a photography business and I want to be online. In two respects, I want an online portfolio and store as well as design websites for others to showcase their photos.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash? Not really, for one simple reason Flash/Silverlight are controled by their respective plug in's/api's and so forth. Thus no worrys about how something will render if one person is using one browser and another is using something else On the other hand, HTML is controled by the browser and each will do things a little different, either because they have not fully followed standards (MS) or they have added extras in a attempt to out do each other (all of them) Thus there will be always a place for things like flash/SL as with them content is delivered exactly as the designer/developer intended not how the browser decides to interpret it
Looking at the widespread usage of Flash (not that I like it), Flash is considered standard by now?
Meh. I sucked out on my reply and didn't explain myself enough. Here I try again.
The beauty of XHTML Strict is that it forced you to write correct code. (If you don't want to, there was always transitional.) I am 99% sure that the w3c documents for all HTML specs only cover how to render correct code, not incorrect code or quirks. This means if you F-up your webpage in plain old HTML, it is not reasonable to expect it to render consistently between browsers, even if they are standards complaint. Now that is a travesty. Worse yet, your page is more likely to break in future browsers. Thus, XHTML strict is in theory more interpolatable than other versions of HTML because it has to be correct to display period.
That is why I don't think XHTML was a waste of time.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
to learn. A LOT more difficult.
For you perhaps but not for everyone. Look at slashdot's code, there are no tables. A List Apart has some good tutorials on how to use CSS for layouts. As does Zen Garden. Eric Meyer has some good books on it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You obviously haven't tried this...
vertical-align: middle; only works like you think it does along with display: table-cell, but in some browsers it breaks horribly.
For table cells it specifies vertical centering. For inline elements it specifies how to align them relative to the baseline of the containing text. For block elements it does nothing.
http://phrogz.net/CSS/vertical-align/index.html
margin: auto 0 has zero effect because of margin collapsing.
http://www.researchkitchen.de/blog/archives/css-autoheight-and-margincollapsing.php
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
openlaszlo is an open source opion that gives you a datagrid...
FTW!
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
(with apologies to the Lynx users among us).
I use elinks you insensitive clod!
Why can't HTML5 be implemented as a plug in?
Because that'd be like making Firefox into a plug-in for IE. Oh wait: that already happened.
A little bit of time with tcpdump will get around whatever "protections" are in Flash.
Not in the United States, it won't.
To me, this single runtime sounds like a much better alternative that the kludge that is HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX support a multitude of IE6/IE7/IE8/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browser runtimes, especially if there's no framework behind them.
Hallelujah, somebody making sense. This slashbash discussion has missed the single biggest problem with delivering complex applications over html - lack of a consistent framework.
HTML will continue to be popular for what it is, but it's a horrible way to write the front end for a distributed database application. It cripples the user interface, and we see all sorts of complex tricks with piles of inscrutable cross-platform javascript to accomplish straight-forward application programming tasks.
IMHO, Silverlight, Flash and JavaFX are version "1.0" of coming RIA platform. Version "2.0", will by elegant and simple.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Nature will find a way.
There is already greasemonkey and adblock. But, yeah, it might get more difficult. But a list of xpaths to delete on a site basis like the filter lists for adblock might come a long way.
make it too rich and capable, and Apple might abandon web browsing on the iPhone altogether to prevent sites from competing with the app store.
8==8 Bones 8==8
A well functioning company who devote all of their efforts to multimedia and optimization of multimedia routines will always outperform something which has to be implemented by every browser individually. This is particularly true given that no browser team will have adobes resources, know-how and clout gained through producing editing software, effects software, audio software, image software etc. This will only end once the multimedia demand ceiling is hit like it was with the audio playback industry where the majority have been happy to settle for mp3s because they can barely tell the difference in effective quality given anything better. So I don't think we're there yet and html video will not do all the cool OSX style stuff that flash is starting to do: (top of the page) http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/features/ or interactive 3d video (yeh really) http://demos.immersivemedia.com/index.php?clip=WW1 For quite some time to come. Not to mention interactive webcam videos, live video compositing and transforming, dynamic compiled filters etc. I am, however, glad that interactivity through html and flash is basically javascript adressing different DOMS.
Uhmmmm... so in addition to Noscript, Flashblock and Adblock we would also need HTML5Block.
Sigh...
"Ah, I hate CSS. But I took a hard nose dive into it and sort of got the hang of it. I understood it well enough to be somewhat dangerous with it. Still, I think tables are much easier to design with. Maintaining them? Not so much."
Thank you too. Meanwhile, I lean towards sites that don't need maintaining. Time for the Information Age to regain a touch of durability.
For Tabular Data, I'd rather just HOST a spreadsheet!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sounds to me like this is really just about a compiled model versus a declarative scripted model. I'd imagine that at some point in the future, the theoretical capabilities would be very similar, and that developers will make a choice based on code security and startup performance. That's assuming any scripted version can be compiled and made to perform similarly to pre-compiled code.
Wait a second... I thought I saw that guy earlier:
From a previous article.
From this article.
And no, I don't read the articles, I just look at the pictures.
I've been experimenting a lot with the HTML5 tag recently, and you can do some nice stuff - these are all pretty basic but using just HTML and JS I built a freaky clock, a 60s style UFO party viewed from above and some wireframe boxes. It was all quite painless, the only problem is that IE doesnt support it yet.
If you're sending HTML in email, I'll never see that content. Attachments are never shown inline. Certain attachments are removed automatically --- pps for example.
Oh, and forget javascript and 3rd party cookies. Don't allow them through our proxy. Too dangerous. I find myself using "mobile" versions of some sites to avoid that garbage. I fear the day that mobile devices support flash completely. Then I'll be living in google-cache versions of all sites.
Well played, sir ;-)
But if the FSF wants* to preach to the unconverted, that pretty much requires IE support. That is difficult for saints in the church of emacs, who run a wholly (not the pun) free operating system ;-)
(some members are non-saints, though).
*it does; that's much of what RMS does these days.
After the Omniture debacle I would very much like to see Adobe go the way of SCO.
The only way to download a movie from one of these is to pretend you're their branded flash player and siphon the data stream... very few sites let you get the FLV file URL from the page source or any other casual means
If you use Firefox there's a number of different add-ons you can use to grab and save FLV files. And that's true for other video formats as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
i wonder that nobody yet pointed to this webpage: http://ishtml5readyyet.com/ ...
in this way flash is a lot like google gears. We get the features of tomorrow delivered today (or even earlier considering the age of flash)... and in the case of flash on 97% of browsers with the small cost of being a plugin.
So all the flash bashing folks should think a second about the bad plugin management of todays browsers. maybe html 5 should also define a better way to handle browser and plugin interaction. this would make copy+paste/drag and drop from plugin to html content much easier.
If your Flash file works in IE, it works in FF, Opera, Safari, etc. It requires a plugin sure, but it's one that's almost universally adopted.
I don't know how many tymes I've come across a Flash movie, though a bunch, where it says I need to upgrade my Flasher player to at least v9, before the movie will play. Using Adobe's Flash version tester it says I have 9,0,151,0 installed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Update: Furthering Adobe's commitment to the Linux community and as part of ongoing efforts to ensure the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, an alpha refresh of 64-bit Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux operating systems was released on 2/24/09 and is available for download. This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux distributions and removes the need for 32-bit emulation. Learn more by reading the 64-bit Flash Player 10 FAQ.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes, but somebody skilled in video editing and graphic design can easily make changes to a .fla file, but not a javascript file. Sometimes complexity is prohibitive, especially with small to medium companies that don't have a small army of programmers.
Both Flash and javascript require skills. However whereas the tools for Flash are expensive the tools for javascript come installed on most computers. When I used Windows I used Crimson Editor, NotePad, or Wordpad which are all free. Having switched to Mac I use TextEdit, which came with my Mac. On Linux I used Katie, though I could also use emacs, vi, or a number of other FOOS editors. Add if you use Firefox there are add-ons that you can use to edit javascript.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
xhtml
html5 has some of the same rules xhtml does, such as all tags needing to be closed, from what I read about it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Microsoft never supported it in IE
MS did support xhtml. Though it was years ago I took an xhtml class that was required at the college I attended then. The only browser we used was IE. In a javascript class we had to use xhtml also, but in it we got extra points if the js worked in both IE and Netscape. The same is true for the xml class.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
There is a DataGrid component in the free Flex SDK. The AdvancedDataGrid is part of the data visualization package that comes with Flex Builder Professional. In general, the Flex community thinks the AdvancedDataGrid is garbage. Slow, messy, and written by engineers that aren't part of the main Flex team who don't follow the official best practices. There are functions in its classes that are hundreds of lines long. I'm not kidding. I know guys who have written their own implementation of the features in AdvancedDataGrid because it sucked so bad. Thankfully, most use-cases for a DataGrid will be handled just fine by the regular DataGrid in Flex.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
Joe Average User is not going to crop and save a screencap using image editing software.
Maybe not, but if he's using a Mac, he might just press Cmd-Shift-4 and directly crop the image to a file on his desktop.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Google's dropped IE6 support from Gmail, and IE6 is roughly 20% of the browser population.
Futher, Gmail is a relatively simple web app. It's just a mail client. There are things you simply cannot do with IE, no matter what compatibility hacks you throw in.
Thus no worry about how something will render if one person is using one browser and another is using something else
Which in precisely which I hate flash. I like to lounge in my chair and flash uses super duper tiny fonts - probably 5x7 like the pocket calculators from the 80'th.
It renders all the same - not matter what display size, no matter which dpi, no matter if the user can actually read it.
Flash tramples over the users need. When ohh when will web designers stop being egocentric and start to think about the reader instead.
Martin