On 22/07/2010 17:31, Marcus Harris wrote:
Flash is pain and should hopefully go the way of the dodo very soon, if html5<video> with open formats takes off. BBC are being nudged to use<video> more (I think it's already available on iPlayer for Apple - and a BBC news site redesign is coming soon) and it can't happen soon enough.
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Web functionality that otherwise would require some other client software than the browser - lots of video, access to webcams and stuff is only really available to users on GNU/Linux at this point because we have a Flash player that works, and the other platforms have Flash players that work, too. The alternatives would be windows and maybe mac desktop apps, or plugins, or just media in proprietary formats.
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Yes, it's evil and proprietary and stuff, but it works for Linux users through conscious effort - and in the absence of a 1) viable and 2) widely adopted open source alternative. It is an option for people to live vicariously and use and develop Gnash, or in the case of video, simply grab it and decode it for themselves with, say, Xine - or even to cross their fingers and hope a morally proper alternative turns up at some point.
That's a very good point, well made. Imagine if, in the late 90s and early 2000s when IE was *the* de facto browser (with > 95% market share), that MS had actually implemented a <video> tag. All the content producers at the time would have instantly supported it to the detriment of anything else, and MS would have made every effort to ensure that it didn't run on anything else. There would certainly have been much less incentive to try the upstart alternatives that appeared (or the legacy Netscapes, etc) if they didn't support the MS-only video that everyone was producing.
One could almost conclude that Flash - given that it is mostly cross platform and has been for a fairly long time, or at worst at least the video format of which was based on a published spec (patents or no) - may have significantly helped stave off such an absolute lock-in situation for long enough for there to be proper browser competition and to allow discussion about a more open <video> tag to happen at all.
Simon