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Tuesday, July 17, 2007

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Paulius Uza

I will not express how amusing this post was. Thank you.

adampasz

...speaking of violating basic principles....

DuDE. leArn 2 usE Caps.

Oliver Turner

"announcing the death of flash certainly has quite a bit of wishful thinking on my part to it"

And why would that be? Perhaps the same cluelessness you accuse others of? Certainly a statement like "flash-based sites never were and never will be real web content" makes you sound so.

Flash isn't FOSS, but being freely available and virtually ubiquitous it has a place on the web where - believe it or not - being design-happy also has a place, not at the expense of user interaction but as its complement. Now we developers can finally mimic the behaviours we've always enjoyed in Flash through DHTML and XmlHttpRequest - drag-and-drop, dynamic page updating, etc - but only at long last, and, as usual, subject to the vagaries of browser implementation. (Oh yeah... and only when JavaScript is enabled). If you feel that this kind of feedback is also "99% bad" because it transcends the limitations of basic web architecture then we'll have to agree to disagree.

In any case surely flash is better positioned to adapt to the new interaction paradigm than plain HTML?

milan

When you are talking about web, you are actually talking about html. But html and web are two different things, right? Stateless html client is usable for a lot of things, but not for all, and by my opinion it is just one (first) step in evolution of web. Flash is there for pushing boundaries further and hopefully there will be also other technologies available (Silverlight, JavaFX,...). I think apple made mistake with iPhone and as they said they will put Flash into next update. Hopefully. Erik, just don't swim in the opposite direction of the river flow :)
BR Milan

eilandmeisje

I have a number of blind friends who would actually be delighted if Flash were to die. It's one of the major no-nos that make websites inaccessible for them, dependent as they are on screen-reading software (Mac OS X-Voiceover / Windows-JAWS) and/or Braille displays. Of course a device such as the iPhone isn't useful for them either, but if it forces site designers to adhere to better accessibility standards, they will be indirect beneficiaries of iPhone proliferation nonetheless.

Robert Hirst

I can't help but lol at the idea that Flash and Java aren't included for some kind of "good practice" or "accessible web" reasons, or because they are "bad web practice".

So, what's your alternative to something like YouTube which hasn't been blessed by some official Application to enable the Flash/FLV content to be played without Flash?

Hmm, maybe you could embed a Windows Media Player? Yeah, right, like Apple will let MS write an ActiveX plugin.... Silverlight? Moonlight? Same deal... there must be multimedia technology which you can embed into a webpage.... something that will work with iPhone right out of the box... oh yeah! Quicktime! The real dead duck of the internet world, the one plugin I would never let anywhere near my computer, as the last time I downloaded it installed itself into my start-up list, added tray icons and a ton of background processes and was bundled with a heap of stuff I didn't want.

Now, please can you explain to me why using Flash to develop multimedia apps is bad web practice and using QuickTime to do the same thing isn't?

Bad practice is telling customers what they want, and not the customers telling you.

Ryan

Wow dude - you bring up several very irrelevant points... If Flash is dying, then why is it that there is a major battle between MS and Adobe over the rich client arena?

Keith Peters

Sorry, Flash is here to stay and will soon be on your iPhone. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder about Flash, so I won't argue about whether or not there is "real content" in Flash or whether everyone who uses it doesn't "understand the web". Let me know when Flash actually dies so I can start looking for another job. :)

mike

ahh.. you do realize Flash will be on the iPhone soon, right?

Oscar Trelles

Can't believe how wrong I've been, and will continue to be for years to come :)

eokyere

if u r selling ads, then posts like this make sense; otherwise, it's just plain stupid

the iphone will support flash (http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?rss&newsid=18480)

-- eokyere

david

Look at Adobe AIR.
JavaScript, XML, Flash...

You may want to reconsider.

Russ

I guess you must have been upset that no one was looking at your blog, what other reason could you possibly have for posting such a ridiculous entry...

Beedigital

"Posted by: Ryan | Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 06:50"

Hello Ryan,did you paste the comment Robert at http://www.beedigital.net/blog/?p=975#comments or it was him who copy yours?

Well said anyway...

Comet!

Oh! Come on! These kind of posts are from 5 years ago. They have nothing to do now.
I shall recommend you to use Flash/Flex. Can you?
Don´t be a loser!

josh

What are you like an amish guy how makes web sites? Besides where did you get this report from, the bush administion? The bottom line is if any one in "Multimedia" gave a sh!t about your opinion, you would be the first they throw it at. Though that's assuming people haven't all ready been throwing fecal matter at you.

Mario

Why stop at Flash? What about those poor sods that are stuck with 300 baud TTY modem links to the world? Just imagine how compromised they are by all that bandwidth sucking HTML gibberish. Has anyone given even the slightest consideration to these folks?

And then there are the poor folks that are still scratching out markings on clay tablets …

When will the insanity of progress end? Ahhh, the good old days of basic grunts and groans!!

George

I don't understand why Flash haters are so adamament about 'basic web principles'. Basic web principles (like static pages and back buttons)are essentially founded in severe technological limitations. I don't understand why basic web principles should be regarded in any favorable light. At their core they are the antithesis of basic usability principles found in every modern OS, device and pretty much anything that is meant to interact with a human. Would you consider it a superior interface if your file browser had to leave it's current view, go into a new window then return back to the previous window to complete the simple task of renaming a single file? Forget drag and drop, I'm sure you think that putting a check box beside every single file and a link at the top that says 'move checked files' which brings you to a new page were file locations are manually entered into a form is much superior. My point is that these things you call 'basic web principles' are nothing more than a series of compromises which where made because it wasn't technically feasable to implement the superior interface methods of every modern GUI.

dret

george: thanks for your comment. insisting of "basic web principles" to be followed is not just a bone-headed hobby of some old-fashioned people who tragically missed the trend towards graphical interfaces. i do get a lot of these responses (and i really liked the comment saying "are you some amish guy designing web pages?"), and there is that trend to picture adherence to architectural principles as stupid fundamentalism, basically turning me into a taliban of the web. but i think there are very good and compelling reasons to take web architecture seriously (and other people obviously think otherwise).

for me the important point is that the web is an information system, not just a transport infrastructure. it has been designed for open information exchange in a loosely coupled environment and is good at that and is successful because of that. the ui principles you are mentioning are platform issues which are highly successful ways of building applications on one platform, but these two things should no be confused. if they are, you end up building platform apps (for windows, flash, or apollo or whatever), and any attempt to really integrate that app's data and functionality into the web can become very hard.

so i think looking at the web's basics as some old-fashioned thing that soon will be replaced by something superior such as (( insert your favorite ria platform here )) is ignoring the difference between an information system and apps, but i may be proven wrong. (( insert your favorite ria platform here )) might take over the world very soon. my guess, however, is that (( insert your favorite ria platform here )) is just another way of (( insert the company marketing your favorite ria platform here )) trying to make sure that they get the lock-in that they need.

Jacob

How did you manage to attract so many flash apologists to your post? Perhaps Adobe has them all organized into militias?

Adrian Finlay

I can't believe how puerile and inane these comments are - specially considering how insightful and well-written your article is.

But I guess it's understandable when you consider that these people are all Flash developers who have invested years of their lives in a closed-source environment that will eventually become redundant.

You guys need to face facts: the growing sophistocation of the average web user now regard Flash as a nuisance. Besides Flash video, which is basically why Flash is still around, Flash is used in only the most obnoxious and pointless applications - banner ads, annoying advertising popups, and gratuitous and pretentious "designy" sites.

Good riddance, when it finally does die.

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