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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."
I'm not against flash, but i would like to be able to opt it out without losing any feature of the website i'm browsing. As i don't need/like flash based games and bloated intros, at the moment i got it installed just to watch embedded videos. One feature to go.
slashwhat?
We'd like you to buy into OUR implementation. That cloud ought to be accessible to anyone's computer - as long as they're running Flash.
Adobe wants a monopoly on content, and wants the OS to be commoditized. I want the whole platform to be commoditized - and that's why I support truly open standards.
If they really want to boost Flash adoption, they should make it open-source!! Or at the very least make cheap authoring tools that everyone can use. Flash isn't really all that multiplatform, b/c the authoring tools exist only for Windows and Mac ... where are the versions for Linux, BSD, Solaris?
"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"
You mean, like these pages that say "To watch that, you need Flash 10"?, I have found loot of these. Your propietary extension is not better than some people doing a XUL remote webapp. (full disclosure: I have released a few xul apps, look for Tei in sf)
-Woof woof woof!
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.
*sigh* another company claiming that what they're doing is "platform independent" because they've created versions for a few platforms. Just like Microsoft with their Silverlight technology, Flash isn't platform independent at all. Sure Adobe has created Flash for a few different platforms, just like MS has created a Mac-version of Silverlight, but at the end of the day, Flash only works on the platforms Adobe have decided to create a binary for.
What platform independence is all about, is that the platform is completely irrelevant. You know, like the web is supposed to be. Javascript doesn't care if it's running on an Intel chip or an ARM chip, it doesn't care if you're running it in Windows or Linux, it doesn't care which browser you are using. THAT is platform independence. Loading the approriate binary for your platform is not, especially if you can't create these binaries yourself in the case Adobe doesn't support your platform.
This is why Flash is terrible for the web. When websites rely heavily on Flash, it basically turns the web into an Adobe-only platform. That's terrible for everyone, no matter how Adobe is trying to sell it to you.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
"I'm sorry, if you really want to read this post you have to use Flash."
Adobe wants web content to just run anywhere? When the plugin they sell doesn't run everywhere and in places it does run, it often runs poorly?
Where is Flash for BSD? For AMD64? Oh, wait, when Adobe speaks about the net, they mean IE.
Adobe, the reason Apple hates your guts is because you never ever supported their OS properly until you absolutely had to.
Oh and I hate your guts too, just a little bit more then Steve Jobs in fact, so I hope he rapes your stinking rotting corpse and eats your babies. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is worth cheering on.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.