Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards

An anonymous reader points out an 18-month-old interview with the founders of Adobe (and creators of PostScript) Charles Geschke and John Warnock, and highlights three interesting quotes from the book Masterminds of Programming that seem very timely now. "'It is so frustrating that this many years later we're still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we're still living with them. It's always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you've codified them as eternal, and that's stupid. ... With Flash what we're trying to do is both beef it up and make it robust enough so that at least you can get one language that's platform-independent and will move from platform to platform without hitting you every time you turn around with different semantics. ... You can see why, to a certain extent, Apple and Microsoft view that as a challenge because they would like you to buy into their implementation of how the seamless integration with the Web goes. What we're saying is it really shouldn't matter. That cloud ought to be accessible by anybody's computer and through any sort of information sitting out on the Web."

Comments

Re:"Looks to me, I am open!"

[Thanshin]

He didn't mean:

"It is so frustrating [...] where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. [as opposed to this always working]"

What he meant was:

"It is so frustrating [...] where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox [as opposed to Flash]"

Pot ... kettle

[mangu]

You mean, like these pages that say "To watch that, you need Flash 10"?

In the Wikipedia article on Pot calling the kettle black there's this alternative interpretation: "the pot is sooty (being placed on a fire), while the kettle is clean and shiny (being placed on coals only), and hence when the pot accuses the kettle of being black, it is the pots own sooty reflection that it sees"

This is how I see Adobe's accusation against Firefox. I have yet to see *one* single site that requires Firefox, I have lost count of the sites that require Flash.

Re:If they really want to boost Flash adoption ...

[brillow]

Good point, also, appeals to "performance" are short-sighted in computer land. Anything which runs too slow on a computer this year will be butter by next year. Apple is not against flash because its bad, but because once the performance problems go away with the next generation of hardware, Adobe has a platform which can do an end-run around Apple's app-store ecosystem. Its the same kind of logic behind why they don't allow java. If Flash and Java ran in the browser on an iPhone, then you could actually develop high-powered webapps, and run a web-based app store. Not to mention all the cross-platform development. This is especially true since Android is rapidly gaining marketshare, Apple is trying to lock up developers as fast as possible so they won't jump to Android quite as quickly when it inevitably overtakes them, and it is inevitable. There's no way Apple can compete with all the hardware-variety of Android phones. Plus, in a few years there will be Android phones doing something Apple can never do, which is being given away for free with contract. Not to mention Android apps are going to run on tablets and your TV (without any lame pixel doubling).

Re:That's very nice of you Adobe

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Have you taken a look recently at what is going over the wire when you play a "flash" video?

In the substantial majority of cases, it'll be a tiny little .swf object, providing the controls, followed by a .flv or .mp4 video(with the latter becoming more common as time goes on), more often over http, sometimes over rtmp.

Depending on the exact whim of the publisher, "flash video" is almost always a proprietary variant of h.263, VP6, or h.264.

With the exception of the old-style vector-animated .swf stuff, there is no such thing as "flash video", just video codecs that Flash Player has decode support for. Pretty much all of which are proprietary, patent-encumbered, or both.

Re:This depends on the site...

[tverbeek]

Before Adobe bought Macromedia and decided to turn Flash into a video-streaming plugin, it actually did serve as a good solution to the balkanization of nonstandard HTML/javascript/CSS implementations for developers who wanted or needed a consistent user interface across platforms. Granted, it required that the user install the Flash plugin, but once they did, you could be reasonably certain that all of your buttons were placed, looked, and functioned correctly, that all of your UI feedback animations played correctly, that the correct fonts were displayed and scaled correctly, etc. Flash has always provided a richer design toolkit than even current HTML/CSS implementations support. (e.g. Want rounded corners (like on this site)? Firefox and Webkit browsers use different syntax, and IE8 won't do it at all without some really ugly hacks.) Maybe full implementation of HTML5 and CSS3 will catch up with (or nearly so) what you could do with, say Flash 5, but quite frankly they haven't yet. Any designer without a seething hate-on against Adobe will confirm this.

Re:This depends on the site...

[riegel]

You are in IT, you do what management tells you.

You miss the point. The shortest route to a cross browser solution is the way I propose.

If you are saying that management dictates an IE ONLY solution then I will have to ask for a citation as that does not seem plausible to me.

Re:That's very nice of you Adobe

[arielCo]

This is interesting:

Using Adobe Flash in developing Gnash in the EU

The question of exactly how legal it is to use Adobe Flash in the course of developing Gnash is a frequent topic on the Gnash mailing lists. Here I'll discuss the situation in the EU.

In this subject I'll avoid the term reverse engineering since it means different things to different people.

The relevant legislation in the EU is the Council Directive 91/250/EEC of 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs. Council directives are generally implemented also in national law, although the European Court of Justice has held that directives are binding on member states (i.e., EU countries) even if they have not (yet) added them into national law.

The relevant part of the directive is Article 5, paragraph 3:

The person having a right to use a copy of a computer program shall be entitled, without the authorization of the rightholder, to observe, study or test the functioning of the program in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program if he does so while performing any of the acts of loading, displaying, running, transmitting or storing the program which he is entitled to do.

In short, so long as you are allowed to use Adobe Flash, you can use it to observe and study to understand its behavior.

So first we must insure that we have the right to use Adobe Flash. This is easy, because usage of Adobe Flash is free under the Flash EULA.

Now the observant reader might point out that the EULA specifically prohibits using Adobe Flash in order to create a competing product (such as Gnash). However, the above-quoted article from the directive says that the study and observation may take place without the authorization of the rightholder. This means that Adobe cannot bindingly prohibit such activites in its licensing agreements.

bjacques's blog at gnashdev.org I don't know if you can explicitly forfeit a right by accepting a private agreement (the EULA) and then claim that it was never valid. AFAIK, most rights can be waived. Any European lawyers in the house?