MJ Ray wrote:

Why are you installing the Adobe (evil programmer-imprisoners see http://www.freesklyarov.org/ ) Flashplayer instead of mozilla-plugin-gnash?

I assume since you mention it that you have experience of gnash?

I've had a mixture of successes and failures with it, but the failures as often as not seem to crash FF rather than just fail to render correctly. (By "crash" I mean that they take CPU usage up into the clouds and FF becomes unresponsive.)

That's with Ubuntu/64; maybe its better under 32bit.

At the moment I have to say that in my experience Gnash is alpha-quality. This is probably because (like with other web technologies) most of the content is put out there written "so that it works in the mainstream player/browser" rather than actually following the language correctly so that it works in other implementations. Writing an alternative so that it works (not just so that it meets the specs) is non-trivial.

However, if others are having more success with Gnash then I'll play with it a little more.

Mark Rogers

Richard Lewis wrote:

Actually, this touches on one of the important criticisms of Flash: its not a standard in the common sense. Adobe publish the SWF file format specification under a licence which allows developers to create software which generates SWF files, but not to create software which views them:

http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileformat/license/

Ah, I hadn't realised (so may evil licences, so little time...)

At least it's clear and unambiguous (3a says it all).

SVG ftw ;-)

Is there anything much flash can do that SVG can't? Is there a good reason SVG hasn't caught on?

I notice that Adobe are pushing SVG but their own demos don't seem to play with FF's inbuild SVG support, requiring Adobe's free SVG player. So it isn't *that* different....

Richard Lewis wrote:

On Monday 01 October 2007 15:35:12 Mark Rogers wrote:

...

Is there anything much flash can do that SVG can't? Is there a good reason SVG hasn't caught on?

SVG is only for vector graphics;

See http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/comparison_flash_svg/ for a comparison of features. Most people don't realise that SVG has a pretty much equivalent feature set to Flash and is a W3C recommendation. It's just there are no widespread implementations yet!

It doesn't have the audio and video features of Flash, but requiring a vector graphics plugin to view video (like YouTube does) really makes no sense to me. We have other formats for audio and video like the ogg standards and I'm pretty sure they can be embedded inside an SVG document? It's a bit like saying that ODF doesn't have math markup but OOXML does. ODF uses an existing ISO standard but OOXML re-invents the wheel with a completely new method.

It does have the advantage, however, of being a well-formed XML document and is therefore more easily indexable by search engines, readable with non-supporting browsers, and scriptable with ECMAScript. (Imagine rich SVG applications with liberal dollops of XMLHttpRequest goodness. Mmmm.)

Exactly! In my opinion Flash is one of the most broken things about the web at the moment, which is a shame because it's driving some of the most innovative new services on the web. I wrote a blog post about this last month, listing the open standards that already exist to cover all Flash's features. http://tola.me.uk/blog/2007/09/21/flash_is_killing_the_web

I guess the steps that would increase SVG's market share would be: the free availability of a plugin for many browsers which supports nearly all of the standard, the availability of a professional quality authoring tool (equivalent to Shockwave), and the adoption of it as a tool for making (annoying) adverts.

Again I agree. In my blog post I provocatively (and perhaps unfairly) aimed my sights at browser developers, but the point is that we need to keep up with actually implementing the open standards or proprietary solutions will get there first. Application developers and designers are pragmatists, they use the best solution available to the greatest number of people and so far that's Flash.

Whether or not increasing SVG's market share is a /good/ thing is another question entirely.

And my answer would be a resounding "yes".

-- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk

MJ Ray wrote:

As I understood it, all Flash players are a bit unsteady, so I wondered why one would pick the programmer-imprisoners' one.

At the moment it's a bit like comparing the unsteadiness observed whilst standing on a tube journey with the unsteadiness that might be expected were you stood on top of the carriage dodging obstructions hanging from the tunnel roof....

Given the task involved (ie writing a "player" for content "coded" by a vast array of "designers" across the planet) it's pretty good and all credit to the coders, but at the moment there's no real alternative to the Macromedia Flash player for those who want access to the content. A great shame that is too.

(Based on experience a couple of months back with Gnash 0.8.0, maybe things have moved on a bit with the current 0.8.1 alpha release - the release notes sound promising.)

MJ Ray wrote:

As I mentioned, media players like mplayer and VLC seem to play the useful audio/video content in most cases, so there is a real alternative for the most useful content.

Useful alternatives for content creators, maybe, but not much use to content users until the creators shift.

In any case, something like Flash has a wide range of uses for which it is better suited than many video formats (in the same way that vactor graphics formats are better suited than .png/.jpeg to many applications). That's an argument for a well supported open standard in that area, not for Flash, however.

I'm not one to "blame" Macromedia for this though. The readiness of people to accept something which is free (as in beer) when it is far from free (as in speech) provided Macromedia with an opportunity to make money, and I'm not naive enough to suggest that Macromedia should have walked away from this. There should have been a much stronger push for open standards and a refusal to accept a closed standard like this, which would never have happened in the closed world of IE domination. We should perhaps be grateful at least that is not a Microsoft format (otherwise there wouldn't even be a Linux proprietary player for it).

This is all a very good argument for the distinction between beer and speech freedoms, which will come as no surprise to people on this list I am sure.

<RANT>To take this one step sideways: If there'd been a requirement for the various government IT schemes to be modular systems with clearly defined open specifications for the interactions between the systems, regardless of whether the software vendors chose to use proprietary systems to implement those standards, would we have seen the various wide ranging IT farces of recent years? Would it not have promoted choice and competition, and wouldn't it have given an opportunity for FOSS to prove itself on a level playing field? Surely standards like SMTP, HTTP, FTP, XML etc (not to mention TCP/IP etc) have proven themselves sufficiently that the idea of defining a clear and open interaction between systems should be common-sense by now. Instead of pushing petitions to move government to open source software, we as a community should be pushing open standards above everything else. Open standards do not exclude closed corporations (Exchange and Outlook, Internet Explorer and IIS, etc), so closed corporates have less to complain about.</RANT>