yeah whatever
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Nov 30, 2006 9:03 AM EDT |
This is a classic example of humans gumming up good things. Flash is pretty nice for what it does- it's efficient and not too difficult for the creator. Unfortunately it gets overused, misused, and abused to the point that I'm about ready to start mailing dog poop bombs to every Web developer I can hunt down. For the player, I don't understand why Adobe doesn't just open source the dommed thing. They don't sell the player, they make their money on the hideously expensive dev tools. Whine whine whine "too many different Linuxes, waaahhh." I am so sympathetic. Not. |
| jimf Nov 30, 2006 10:24 AM EDT |
> dog poop bombs Isn't that already a flash feature :D |
| Libervis Nov 30, 2006 12:51 PM EDT |
Haha.. I don't use flash at all. Who needs that? Not to mention that it doesn't respect my proxy settings in firefox and sends traffic through a more expensive direct connection (GPRS) anyway. Of course, if we had a source and were allowed to, we could fix this kind of disobedience. ;) |
| jezuch Nov 30, 2006 1:13 PM EDT |
*I* don't use Flash... but webmasters at my company do. And it hurts my eyes. What's really surprising, the customers seem to like it. Ouch... |
| Libervis Nov 30, 2006 1:49 PM EDT |
Using flash is bad web design IMO, not to mention that it's not very search engine friendly. Put all of your content in flash and googlebot probably will not see anything on your site. And of course, people who don't have a flash plugin wont see anything either.. |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 30, 2006 3:58 PM EDT |
> For the player, I don't understand why Adobe doesn't just open source the dommed thing. Easy. It would allow us to quickly and fully understand the flash file format, which means we could biuld FOSS dev tools for it. You don't really thing we'd accept a FLOSS player and not try to make dev tools out of it, would you? |
| swbrown Dec 01, 2006 1:06 AM EDT |
Flash is (or at least was, not sure if it is still) an open-ish format. It wasn't standardized or anything, but Macromedia distributed all the specs on the format, how the stack machine worked, and details of the opcodes. A long time ago, I had used the flash decompiler built with those specs and wrote a translator to turn segments of the stack machine code into Perl to make it easy for me to simulate the checksums and such Flash games used to prevent people from easily setting an arbitrary high score. :) If you're interested in working towards a Free Software flash, the current project to work on is gnash from the GNU project. However, I think the most important use of flash, video serving, wouldn't really be doable since if I remember right, it's some heavily patented format like MPEG4. If you're interested in Free video serving, look into Fluendo's Java applet for Theora streaming. Since Java will be integrated all over the place in Linux in a few months, this will be a much more compatible way of serving video than flash - everyone will be able to view it. Note that there's no fancy magic in the Flash player YouTube and folks use - it just streams the file as a normal HTTP download. It would also be useful to do advocacy as to why people should store their content in Vorbis and Theora rather than proprietary formats, and advocacy aimed at sites that host video content as to why they should support Open formats. As for Flash in web pages, it's on the way out (in theory :)), and is a bad technology anyway due to it being in a world of its own - can't easily interoperate with normal web tools as mentioned in a previous post. The idea is to replace it with DHTML, SVG, JavaScript, and a couple other technologies. The issue right now is that the folks that did SVG libraries approached it from an angle that isn't suitable for realtime use - they were more interested in high quality rendered output (note that the InkScape guy did his own code for it which is why it's so fast). The FireFox folk are currently working on a fast, dynamic implementation layered on top of Cairo. That'd be a good project to poke around on if you're interested in seeing this happen faster. |
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