Ah ... so Apple plans to kill Flash with HTML5

[Jeff da Weasel]

And the text was from some gallery or magazine that had written about him...

It's tough not to cringe at that stuff. The generational chasm of understanding these technologies is hard to witness firsthand.

[girevik]

I have one elderly visual artist client who, while he does have a computer, is so unfamiliar with how the web works that he asked me to change some text I didn't recognize. I asked him what page it was on (but I already knew it wasn't in the site) and he said, Well, it's that page that comes up when you type in my name. After some back and forth, I realized he meant Google's search results. And the text was from some gallery or magazine that had written about him... He's a fine artist, though. No puns intended.

Sounds like some folks we had to deal with at another client site. They were used to working with mainframe terminals. If they had their way, their new web app (that we worked on for them) would be all green characters on black background.

[MikeRivers]

Have I got a browser for you!

http://lynx.isc.org/

 

Actually, I was using Lynx when I first got on the WWW with a dial-up connection to a server at the Library of Congress that I was doing some work for at the time. Then a revolutionary add-on calld SlipNot came along that allowed it to display graphics, and the race was on. Next stop, Windows and Netscape.

[blue2blue]

 

Actually, I was using Lynx when I first got on the WWW with a dial-up connection to a server at the Library of Congress that I was doing some work for at the time. Then a revolutionary add-on calld SlipNot came along that allowed it to display graphics, and the race was on. Next stop, Windows and Netscape.

I remember the first embedded graphic in an internet page I went to... it took, I dunno, 20 minutes for a 1.5 x 2" picture to come in and I remember going out, making coffee, playing with the cats out in the back yard, thinking, man, I'm paying by the minute for this! Going back in and it was still waiting on the DL. I came to think of any picture more than an inch square as unconscionably large.

 

I think my Modem was a 300 baud. I turned off image display in whatever I was using, I think it was a net portal from Compuserve or AOL or Prodigy (Prodigy was just so I could get the early, finally-abandoned online version of the LA Times... I got to read about the LA Riots only hours after they were happening... in my backyard [no, really, sparks were falling into my back yard from the burning buildings a few hundred feet away. I'd say good times with a cynical air but then I'd have to dope slap myself.])

 

Anyhow... obviously pictures in online pages -- a slippery slope. We could be in trouble, any time now...

[rasputin1963]

When FLASH first came out, I was really big into it.

 

In fact, I was creating super-cool and quite complex vector animations and Flash-based websites long before most web designers and lay public knew how to use it at all or even recognized what it was. I liked MACROMEDIA and was somewhat disappointed when it was subsumed into APPLE-- the very soul and definition of Bloatware.

 

Now, like most things for me, FLASH seems too abstruse to f*** with anymore; the fun's gone out of it.

 

Many of my web design clients bitched and moaned that it took too long to load--- that was when most everybody was still on 56k dialup.

 

I'm guessing the real future of FLASH nowadays lies with the iPhones and microscopic whatnot that the kiddies seem obsessed with. For a guy who likes big art, this whole "Let's Get Small" ethos is a drag.

[tremolounge]

I liked MACROMEDIA and was somewhat disappointed when it was subsumed into APPLE-- the very soul and definition of Bloatware.

 

 

That's ADOBE -- yes, the very soul and definition of Bloatware.

[Cry Logic]

 

"....I'm guessing the real future of FLASH nowadays lies with theiPhones and microscopic whatnot that the kiddies seem obsessed with. For a guy who likes big art, this whole "Let's Get Small" ethos is a drag..."

 

 

Ain't no Flash on the iphone Ras.....

That's what's this thread's all about.

Flash has never been "allowed" to run on

on the iPhone OS.

Which means it won't work on the iPad either.

Adobe's not happy about that at all.

Job's stance is that Flash is buggy and most

crashes on Macs are caused by Flash.

 

Now, with YouTube, Vimeo and others already

experimenting with HTML5 video, the writing

could be on the wall for the Flash plugin.

 

Very contentious issue.

[rasputin1963]

That's ADOBE -- yes, the very soul and definition of Bloatware.

 

 

Yerp, that's what I meant. Absent-minded me.

[rasputin1963]

Job's stance is that Flash is buggy and most crashes on Macs are caused by Flash.

 

Which is probably a crock.

[blue2blue]

When FLASH first came out, I was really big into it. In fact, I was creating super-cool and quite complex vector animations and Flash-based websites long before most web designers and lay public knew how to use it at all or even recognized what it was. I liked MACROMEDIA and was somewhat disappointed when it was subsumed into APPLE -- the very soul and definition of Bloatware. Now, like most things for me, FLASH seems too abstruse to f*** with anymore; the fun's gone out of it. Many of my web design clients bitched and moaned that it took too long to load--- that was when most everybody was still on 56k dialup. I'm guessing the real future of FLASH nowadays lies with the iPhones and microscopic whatnot that the kiddies seem obsessed with. For a guy who likes big art, this whole "Let's Get Small" ethos is a drag.

[bold added]

 

I think you mean subsumed into Adobe.

 

Big diff, at this point.

 

 

Right now, it's looking like Apple's last remaining friend among the big boys is -- wait for it -- Microsoft.

 

 

 

I haven't been able to bring myself to upgrade from version 8 of the old Macromedia Suite. Really, for the last few years, I've just used DW for its WYSIWYG capablitities -- but any sort of tricky CSS (and, really, is there any other kind in the browser minefield?) and that falls all apart (it's really got a terrible CSS display engine).

 

 

 

Somewhere, someone in this broader discussion of the exceedingly vaporous HTML5 being thrust into the limelight said something like "Thank heaven Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are almost gone."

 

That guy didn't have a clue. IE 6 & 7 account for a whopping 35% of worldwide browser traffic on average.

 

(You know, that IE 6 -- introduced in August of 2001! It still, by itself, accounts for over 20% -- one fifth -- of all browser usage. So much for early adoption of HTML5, huh?)

 

 

 

Also, another prob is that the negotiations over HTML5 have all but broken down because the two primary editors are from -- wait for this one -- Apple and Google. Yeah... once were friends. Now, according to Steve Jobs (in a meeting with Apple developers) claims Google is trying to kill the iPhone. Tough talk.

 

 

Also, while some of the browsers have announced or even experimented with support for browser-native video, there's absolutely no standardization and, at this point, there appears to be painfully little movement toward establishing a solid standard because of squabbling standards committee participants (Mozilla, Opera, MS, Apple, Google, etc), in addition to the head-butting editors.

 

I just reviewed the status of native browser vid last night -- really discouraging to anyone who thinks the major players ought to be able to play nice together for the sake of the future of the internet and computing for reasons from corporate ego, and plenty of it, to pure dollar issues [H.264 is painfully expensive for the companies to license; but those who wanted to go with a base standard of Ogg were thwarted by Apple] -- the notion that Flash is going away in the next few years is utter fantasy.

 

None of the native technologies offer anything close to the facilities available to Flash developers -- and, of course, they're all competing, conflicting, and developing for such a patchwork quilt would be a nightmare -- that would deliver for the foreseeable future a much poorer viewer experience. (You couldn't come anywhere close to the brilliant and slick UI* of Hulu, for instance, with any of the native implementations.)

 

 

* I mean, Hulu even remembers your place in videos when you stop watching in the middle. None of my DVD player apps even do that! If it could only 'stay on top' (not possible in browser-based Flash, far as I know), it would be near perfect.

[rasputin1963]

 

(You know, that IE 6 -- introduced in August of 2001! It still , by itself, accounts for over 20% -- one fifth -- of all browser usage. So much for early adoption of HTML5, huh?)

 

 

 

 

I did, at one earlier point, boycott IE a bit, and that was when they were extremely laggard (for reasons known only to them) in adopting the PNG-24 image standard.

 

Even dopey NETSCAPE supported it before IE.

 

With the PNG-24 image spec, you could create images with 24 layers of transparency.... allowing you to create some dazzlingly subtle halos, drop shadows, diecut effects, etc., and mount them right onto an HTML page. What's not to like?

 

But IE only adopted it circa 2005 or 2006.

[blue2blue]

Right... it's still recommended to not use transparent PNG's if older IE's forcing it to a solid background will screw up the design.

 

Which is a drag, because there is still an intellectual property cloud haning over the GIF format, decades later. (It's complicated. The GIF was developed, IIRC, by Compuserve, when it was parted out, the GIF format fell into the hands of someone who has been making noises about suing everyone ever since. I might be a little hazy on the details; suffice it to say that it's a cobra in a basket. Or at least we think there's a cobra in there.)

 

 

But, yeah... as a guy with my head in this stuff week in and week out... the less-than-glacial pace of browser adoption makes me laugh right out loud at the notion that HTML5 is going to produce a new, golden era of browser and web app interoperability any time in the foreseeable future. (And let's not forget that while some entities (not just Apple) are rushing ahead of the standards committees to adopt HTML5-like functionalities, the final recommendation stage for HTML5 is not projected to be until 2022 -- and that's running late due to squabling among the players.

 

What we're really going to get are a bunch of corporate d'heads waving their egos around like so many uncooked frankfurters, making a bunch of noise and threats to their 'partners' on the standards committees -- all at the expense of users.

 

And that means that individual companies and their allies will likely proceed with their own "HTML5"-like technologies -- further splintering the markets and just making web developers lives that much more infuriating.

 

It could make a guy sorta cynical.

[UstadKhanAli]

 

Huh? I'm no big fan of Flash -- ten years ago it was safe to say I hated it but there are so many good implementations like YouTube and the Hulu player that it's been winning me (in recent years) -- but what's this about taking time to load?

 

 

Well, I experienced this when I used Flash for the first time with my photography website (www.kenleephotography.com). The first time through, it seemed like it would have to thread through the code. I've shortened the code considerably since then and moved some of the photos to a second Flash Gallery as a sort of Band-Aid. I really don't know how to do websites or Flash, so it'll have to do for now...at least it loads considerably faster. I'll probably split it into three galleries because it still loads too slow for my liking. But yeah, if you put a lot of code into it, it takes a looooooooong time to load.

[blue2blue]

Right... of course... I was talking about properly designed Flash content. :D

 

[Rest assured, your site's OK on my 5mbps hookup. But I'm not sure I'd want to see what would happen over my Blackberry's 112kbps data stream. ]

 

I did not mean to suggest (and such a suggestion would produce outright guffaws all 'round, I'm sure) that there are not people still mis-using Flash or not taking proper advantage of quick-loading strategies.

 

Let's face it, if one is presenting high rez photos or other fat content, there will be times when it takes a sec or two to load.

 

On a number of sites, I use the popular javascript-driven Shadowbox lightbox utility. But, light on its feet as it is, if you feed big images into it, they can take a moment to load. It's the nature of big beasts.

 

But an advantage of Flash over something like Shadowbox is that, with Flash, you can prevent people from easily rt-click copying/downloading your image. (They can still do a screen capture, of course. And there are certainly ways of intercepting data streams in the host, no matter what Adobe claims about their expensive Cold Fusion Flash server's encryption options.)

[rasputin1963]

What we're really going to get are a bunch of corporate d'heads waving their egos around like so many uncooked frankfurters, making a bunch of noise and threats to their 'partners' on the standards committees -- all at the expense of users. And that means that individual companies and their allies will likely proceed with their own "HTML5"-like technologies -- further splintering the markets and just making web developers lives that much more infuriating. It could make a guy sorta cynical.

 

We treasure freedom of choice and competition in a Capitalist society.

 

But in the last few years, computers and web implementation have turned into a veritable Tower of Babel.

 

 

My friends Igor and Andrzjev used to tell me about the good ol' days of the Soviet regime: You could buy any recording you wanted, Comrade... so long as it was on the MELODIYA label. Pop or Classical or Folk or Children's or Spoken Word... it all appeared on MELODIYA.

 

 

As extreme as this may have been, there is a certain wisdom of asserting some overarching standards that everybody can agree upon so we are not sucked into a mire of confusing incompatibilities...

 

What beneficent planets aligned in 1978 when all the music hardware manufacturers agreed on the MIDI spec?

[eventArgs]

With the PNG-24 image spec, you could create images with 24 layers of transparency.... allowing you to create some dazzlingly subtle halos, drop shadows, diecut effects, etc., and mount them right onto an HTML page. What's not to like? But IE only adopted it circa 2005 or 2006.

 

Thankfully javascript makes it pretty easy to display transparency in IE6. Creates more work admittedly, but not much after you've done it once...

[eventArgs]

Now, with YouTube, Vimeo and others already experimenting with HTML5 video, the writing could be on the wall for the Flash plugin.

 

Flash won't be going anywhere for a good while. Even if the big names move on to other platforms, there'll still be millions of sites using Flash. Users will still need the plugin for a decent web experience, and as long as they have the plugin designers will make content for it.

 

Certain industries (I'm looking at you pro photographers) would all but cease to exist on the 'net if you took away Flash.

[UstadKhanAli]

Certain industries (I'm looking at you pro photographers) would all but cease to exist on the 'net if you took away Flash.

 

 

Well, it is an attractive manner of presenting photos. I just don't have the time or inclination to try and figure out another alternative, especially right now, so I'm using the Flash I was given by Patrick/AudioIcon, and am going to divvy it up into smaller galleries so it loads faster. At this point, I really don't have much other choice.

[Cry Logic]

This article on Gizmodo attempts to explain what will

have to take place for HTML5 to replace Flash.

It's a big article and gets a bit technical in places.

It's hard to fathom what will really happen.

Many differing opinions on both sides of the debate.

Articles like this one may simply be disinformation by

Flash advocates.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

[AwayEam]

Thankfully javascript makes it pretty easy to display transparency in IE6. Creates more work admittedly, but not much after you've done it once...

 

 

HEY BRO

 

That's all fine until you need to use alpha channel on a page running an ungodly amount of scripts designed to work with either Microsoft Bing Maps or Google Maps. Having to throw in that DirectX-extension nonsense becomes a huge problem. I hate IE6 with a fiery passion.

 

But all seriousness aside, I don't think HTML5 is gonna be any more successful than XHTML. New web technologies need some very compelling features to encourage adoption, and I just don't see it in HTML5.

 

Also, the whole Apple-hates-Ogg thing alone is probably enough to sink it.

[blue2blue]

 

 

I seldom think about the interwebs without thinking of the Tower of Babel.

 

 

My passage you quoted was more the specific phenom of standards committees, which arise wherever technocrats work out their dharma.

 

You know what they say, happy standards committees are all alike and unhappy standards committees are all unhappy in their own way...

[blue2blue]

 

This article on Gizmodo attempts to explain what will have to take place for HTML5 to replace Flash. It's a big article and gets a bit technical in places. It's hard to fathom what will really happen. Many differing opinions on both sides of the debate. Articles like this one may simply be disinformation by Flash advocates. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

 

Here is perhaps one of the key points to consider from that article:

 

 

The tech press recently transformed HTML5 from a quiet inevitability to an unlikely saviour [...]

[bold added]

 

My disdain for the lack of technical grasp, dearth of logic, and the desperate crowd-think mentality in the tech press zone is based on two and a half decades of reading these bozos. Still, I can't stop. Just often enough... I actually get some meaningful news, a strategic view of various business entities' machinations, and with painful infrequency, some real insight into a tech issue or two. But most of them are vapid, sycophantic tech-wannabes, terrified of being left behind by reporting of the latest trend.

[Phait]

http://gizmodo.com/5461711/giz-explains-why-html5-isnt-going-to-save-the-internet

Giz Explains: Why HTML5 Isn't Going to Save the Internet

[eventArgs]

But all seriousness aside, I don't think HTML5 is gonna be any more successful than XHTML. New web technologies need some very compelling features to encourage adoption, and I just don't see it in HTML5. Also, the whole Apple-hates-Ogg thing alone is probably enough to sink it.

 

Agree about the new features. I think there are, and will be, plenty of developer reactions along the lines of "Yay, we can now do exactly the same things we could do before. Why did we do this again?".

 

I'm not quite sure who thought this collaborative approach would work in the first place. I doubt Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sun etc would agree on what day of the week it is (as in - they would actively choose to disagree), let alone future standards for the web. Proprietry platforms aren't great and all but at least a company can get something out the gate, usable and supported, in a reasonable timeframe.

[eventArgs]

My disdain for the lack of technical grasp, dearth of logic, and the desperate crowd-think mentality in the tech press zone is based on two and a half decades of reading these bozos. Still, I can't stop. Just often enough... I actually get some meaningful news, a strategic view of various business entities' machinations, and with painful infrequency, some real insight into a tech issue or two. But most of them are vapid, sycophantic tech-wannabes, terrified of being left behind by reporting of the latest trend.

 

I don't think this is a tech-only problem. Journalists report to an audience of outsiders (ie mainstream news readers) from outside the industry. The reader feels informed and neither the reader nor the journalist have to think too hard. Everybody is comfortably ignorant.

 

Being in the industry (tech or other) means you have to look harder for meaningful insight.