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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."
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]"
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).
Have you taken a look recently at what is going over the wire when you play a "flash" video?
.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.
.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.
In the substantial majority of cases, it'll be a tiny little
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
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.
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