HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash? 541
superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"
My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:4, Interesting)
But as someone who's thrown together more than a few web applications in my time, I'd like to talk to you about what I'm really excited about--the datagrid element [w3.org].
Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is <table>. Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!
When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page? Hell, it's almost always the next thing to follow <body> on my pages. And you know the code I write to interact dynamically with that table is a bitch. An unmaintainable mess. Yeah, there's probably some library out there I could use to simplify that pain but it always comes down to me messing around with advanced Javascript code trying to squeeze some more functionality into the user's interaction with that table. "Oh, I want this box to highlight red when this happens!" a user might say. Everyone wants a "simple table" with Google Spreadsheets functionality.
So we switched a whole project to Flex once. Yeah, Flex. Free [slashdot.org] right? Not if you want the datagrid [adobe.com]!
Advanced DataGrid component -- The Advanced DataGrid is a new component that adds commonly requested features to the DataGrid such as support for hierarchical data, and basic pivot table functionality. Available only with Flex Builder Professional.
Need to fork over cash for that gem. Oh, you can drone on and on about "vendor lock in" and "hidden costs" with Flash. Don't matter. Customer is king.
My only hope is that HTML 5 presents a competitive datagrid with pivot table functionality. From their specs:
The datagrid element represents an interactive representation of tree, list, or tabular data.
HTML 5, I await you with open arms, hope and understanding. Improve the table element (if possible) and create a solid datagrid element. Deliver me from Flash.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Insightful)
Datagrid or not, if your site requires flash for anything other than playing sound or video files, then it is more than likely I will not spend much time there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Insightful)
Datagrid or not, if your site requires flash for anything other than playing sound or video files, then it is more than likely I will not spend much time there
Absolutely. And it is not just for being unavailable to disabled people, slow, insecure, buggy, destroyer of the control a user has about the navigation (top-of-the-head example: if a menu is implemented in flash, how do you choose whether to open a menu entry in a new tab or new window?), bandwidth-wasting, proprietary, restricted and not class-platform; it is also about the content.
There is a very strong negative correlation between the usefulness of a site and the amount of bling in it.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook [cia.gov] : no Flash; javascript unnecessary
http://www.c-faq.com/ [c-faq.com] : no Flash; no javascript
http://news.google.com/ [google.com] : no Flash ; javascript not necessary
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ [bbc.co.uk] : Fash restricted to the videos ; javascript unnecessary
Now compare this to a typical teenager-oriented website: even menus are Flash. They choose Flash both
for things that make 0 sense being flash (like menus) and for things that may be easier with Flash, but are almost always a big waste of time. They think a website needs to animate every other element.
The one positive aspect in Flash is that it its use warns you against the quality of the content before you waste your time loading and reading it.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or how about:
margin-top: auto;
margin-bottom: auto;
Should I go on?
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Does not work (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously haven't tried this...
vertical-align: middle; only works like you think it does along with display: table-cell, but in some browsers it breaks horribly.
For table cells it specifies vertical centering. For inline elements it specifies how to align them relative to the baseline of the containing text. For block elements it does nothing.
http://phrogz.net/CSS/vertical-align/index.html [phrogz.net]
margin: auto 0 has zero effect because of margin collapsing.
http://www.researchkitchen.de/blog/archives/css-autoheight-and-margincollapsing.php [researchkitchen.de]
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http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/vertical-align [sitepoint.com]
IE 5.5+ supports middle, but both IE and Firefox have trouble with anything but top, bottom, and middle.
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Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Because if you even so much as think about layout and design, while writing HTML, you already have proven yourself to be an amateur.
(X)HTML is pure semantic structure and content. No layout or design involved. If you do it anyway, you are doing spaghetti hacks. Why do you think the <i> tag got replaced by the <em> tag, etc?
CSS is the language for layout and design.
I really like that, because it extends the MVC pattern somehow. You now can split the view into data, structure and visuals.
I think all applications should be developed in that separated way. It would be much cleaner than to program the UI layout manually.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:4, Insightful)
At the end of the day, on most websites, the thing that matters IS the presentation (otherwise the only tags we'd need were h, a, and p). If you can't align one image correctly next to another one, then that is a problem. If you have to sacrifice your design vision at all, then that is a failure of the system. No one coming to your website cares if you've managed to separate the design from the content, that is purely a matter of making life easier for the programmer. If the system can't support the design vision, then it has failed.
Although I do like the idea of CSS, it's the implementation that has failed. Also, it would be great if we could have variables. As in $text="Put your long interesting content here" and then be able to put it anywhere you want on the page. It would be so much easier to read and move stuff around that way.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Goto's are a tool. They just happen to be a tool that has greater potential for misuse than most other control structures in programming. So if you know what you're doing, it's fine to use it. But most people don't know what they're doing, so goto's have become generally frowned upon. And justifiably so, because that greater potential for abuse is really greater. Goto's in compiled code (or if you're actually writing in assembler) are fine because compilers (or people who write in assembler), pretty much a
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Would it really have broken CSS if they'd included something like
#centered-element {
position: centered;
}
or even
#centered-element {
position: absolute;
center: 0;
}
Having to know and use arcane stuff like margin:auto is totally absurd.
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Whoa, I haven't done than since IE4 / Netscape 4.7 days. I use tables for tabular data, very rarely for layout. I'm quite positive I'm not alone in this.
More-or-less. I try to keep everything pure these days (tables only for purely tabular data) but I will often hit things that I want to do but can't do any "proper way" that works well in all the browsers I try to support (at least IE6/7/8 and FF3 sometimes with the addition of Chrome, FF2 and others if I have time to test in them).
I use this technique in such cases: http://giveupandusetables.com/ [giveupandusetables.com] - try to do things "right" for a while, but avoid spending hours banging my head against it when I could be usi
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Informative)
When was the last time I didn't use a table tag on a page? Uh, today... the day before that, and before that.
I use tables rarely and only for displaying data, never for formatting a page. I stopped using tables for design years ago, that's why we have CSS.
I think its time for you to stop using tables for design. Tables lock your user into your content via your specific design. Flexibility and accessibility requires properly formatted CSS with divs and spans, knowing how to use floats and relative positioning.
But yes, datagrid element will be great.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Insightful)
CSS has some nasty cross-browser problems that tables do not, making them far easier than CSS for many things, assuming you can do them in CSS at all.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Informative)
TABLES have nasty cross-browser issues when combined with CSS, and it's ridiculous to program without CSS for formatting. I recently had to return to my old table-layout ways for an HTML newsletter (HTML mails have to be done the old fashioned way because CSS support in mail programs and webmails is 'less than stellar') and experienced long lost pain and anguish from it.
I used to do real complex layouts with tables, graph paper and a simple text editor (even before Photoshop sliced images for table layouts) and I'm glad I have CSS now. The only exception would be using a table with a single cell for vertical alignment now and then, but that's just a small hack. Everything else can be done simpler with CSS.
As for the main topic, I say: not yet... I'm all for replacing Flash with DHTML and do so every chance I get... but it's still to slow and jerky compared with flash animation for smooth scrolling and fx.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's because nobody has sat down and written a comprehensive guide to get developers from "everything you know is wrong" to "now you're doing it right" (if there is, they need to do a better job of getting it listed on Google). Sure, if you search around long enough you'll find how to do a specific "wrong" in a standard-compliant way, but that requires you to know that you were doing it wrong in the first place.
I didn't know until I started validating my pages that
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Insightful)
Through a screen reader [wikipedia.org], maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail, because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.
You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly. [diveintoac...bility.org]
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Thing is, a lot of slashdotters have the "luxury" of ignoring this fact. I cut my web app teeth working for a public university, so this stuff has been seriously ingrained into our policies. We still have a ton of legacy stuff to bring into the 21st century, but I don't know of a shop on campus that thinks tables are an okay way to do layout. And when you do use them, you use them with properly scoped <th>s, etc.
I wish more people did work for the government or maybe accessibility-related NGOs. It was
Screen Reader Issues are Overblown. (Score:3, Insightful)
Through a screen reader, maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.
You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly.
I'd be pretty surprised if screen readers simply and universally fail when they encounter tables that are used for layout. Many of them have existed for a long time, certainly back into the 1990s, and not being abl
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I haven't made a website with a table-based layout in seven years. The only thing I use tables for nowadays is presenting tabular data.
In fact, just thinking about table-based layouts made me feel a little sick.
Of course, I've also been incredibly lucky in that I don't have to support IE, so the stuff I do in CSS actually works. (Just thinking about supporting IE made me feel a little sicker...)
-:sigma.SB
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't have to support IE? I must know what this job is. Please? I do not wish to become known as the IE Developer Serial Killer. What do you do for a living? Seriously. I would take a 20% pay cut to not have to support IE.
Aero
P.S. I can't believe anyone still uses table for layouts. GP is a troll.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Funny)
>You don't have to support IE? I must know what this job is. Please?
He works for the FSF.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Funny)
He doesn't have to support IE, but he does have to hand code his pages using emacs.
Elisp CMS? (Score:3, Informative)
he does have to hand code his pages using emacs.
You just think he's hand-coding his pages. He's really using a website revision system (what's that? [gnu.org]) written partly in Emacs Lisp.
Corporate intranet (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to support IE?
Corporate intranet. The organization is 80% Firefox, 10% Chrome, and 10% Mobile Safari.
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Not having to support IE must be sweet, sweet bliss...
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, I've also been incredibly lucky in that I don't have to support IE
I just clicked on your 'Homepage' link, and I gotta tell ya - your site looks like it would work _perfectly_ in every version of IE ever made.
Well done!
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But as someone who's thrown together more than a few web applications in my time, I'd like to talk to you about what I'm really excited about-- the datagrid element [w3.org]. Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is <table>. Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down! When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page? Hell, it's almost always the next thing to follow <body> on my pages. And you know the code I write to interact dynamically with that table is a bitch. An unmaintainable mess. Yeah, there's probably some library out there I could use to simplify that pain but it always comes down to me messing around with advanced Javascript code trying to squeeze some more functionality into the user's interaction with that table. "Oh, I want this box to highlight red when this happens!" a user might say. Everyone wants a "simple table" with Google Spreadsheets functionality.
Well, although I am not one of the people who thinks people who use tables for layout should all go to hell, I do prefer to NOT use them. I can say that I've written a few web apps myself (and still do) and use tables only for data representation. And I am comfortable to say I am not alone... take a look at, for instance, /.'s source.
Another beautiful example of tableless layout can be found at Zen Garden [csszengarden.com]
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For layouts, CSS is nice, and you can avoid tables for the most part. What I'm curious about - and it's not a rhetorical question, I would love to hear techniques - what do you use for complex forms? Myself, I still compartmentalize everything in tables. Using CS
Disappointed. (Score:3, Funny)
I'm disappointed. I read that as the datagirl element, and I figured the link would take me to some lady's web design howto page, filled with examples, essays, rants, etc.
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About 6 years ago, if not more?
The table element is to display tabular data, not for the layout of websites.
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I do that all the time. What decade are you living in?
I hardly ever use tables for layout (Score:2)
Dude, I hardly ever use tables for layout. I'm not religious about it: now and then it's the practical choice. But such cases are few and far between. My blog, my development pages, my research - table free. Why? As you said, they add complexity: with all those tags they're a pain to implement and maintain.
If you learn enough CSS, most tables just melt away. Sometimes CSS is the pits and I wonder at the twisted minds t
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Why, oh why, can I not mod parent higher than 5?
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Because you posted in the thread, thus removing any mod points you spent?
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You're right. A real data grid that supports data entry and some basic formatting is essential for building any data-intensive application.
I built and still use a 'smart terminal' browser-like front end for the applications my company writes. It's main 'flashy' component is a nice data grid that allows us to build apps using a web-like, thin client architecture but with a desktop-like look and feel.
At various points over the years, I've considered rewriting the front-end to host the functionality in a sta
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That all looks good on paper. My concern however is that any element that's sufficiently complex and insufficiently spec'ed will have subtle differences between render engines.
That, and a certain market dominant browser vendor's track record of arbitrarily interpreting w3c standards.
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A better, more in-line solution is sorely needed. And hopefully all of the browsers will support it properly from the start, so we don't have to deal with a million different redundant "border=0" type entries.
Plus, CSS
Tag to turn stuff off (Score:2)
The way HTML is currently is like a car with hundreds of "Go" buttons, but not a single "Stop" button. To stop, you have to make sure all the "Go" buttons are not pressed. Worse, once you figured out how to disable/escape all the "Go" buttons, the W3C or some browser maker creates a new bunch of "Go" tags...
Example of how the tag could work:
<guard sig="randomhardtoguessstringhere" a
I'll say it, then. (Score:5, Insightful)
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And replace it with Silverlight.
Hehe, seriously, how would you make all those fancy movie websites, e.g. http://www.everybodypays.com/ [everybodypays.com]
There is no way around flash (certainly not with CSS/HTML/JS) for certain forms of representation.
Re:I'll say it, then. (Score:5, Insightful)
One might argue that Adobe should just solve these problems. However, Flash has been around for quite a while - if they haven't fixed these things by now, are they really ever going to? I think not. So, I agree with Gary: can we please start killing it now?
Options (Score:4, Insightful)
But I can't imagine HTML 5 being capable of something like this [nin.com].
Aero
Nor should it be.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"But I can't imagine HTML 5 being capable of something like this [nin.com]"
Nor should it be. That's like saying my car should be able to traverse water too. There are tools for crossing water and tools for crossing land - and they are usually different.
But for simple "Here's a video of my cat yodeling" or "here's a sample of the music file you are about to download" you SHOULDN'T need a plug-in any more than you need a plug-in to view a picture (with apologies to the Lynx users among us).
However: there is no way HTML
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If there's a forked version of Lynx that includes this http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/gallery/ [sourceforge.net] you could still view pictures. I can't tell if anyone's done it yet though (my quick search didn't find any.)
Re:Options (Score:5, Informative)
Except for the music controls, just about everything on that page can be done with current HTML/CSS/JS now.
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I was just thinking that. I went and made a mix account just to check if there were some kind of cool flash based audio tools in there somewhere.
Nope. HTML absolutely should be able to do that. It probably could be done (in extremely crappie fashion) right now using a frame with an embedded background mp3.
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All you need is the audio tag. Which HTML 5 should support.
Everything else can be done in AJAX/CSS/Javascript
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That is nothing. Like everyone else said, you can do everything except the music control without HTML5 (though 5 might make it easier).
If you want to see what HTML5 can do, look at this:
http://www.w3.org/2009/03/web-demo.xhtml [w3.org]
and this:
http://standblog.org/blog/post/2009/04/15/Making-video-a-first-class-citizen-of-the-Web [standblog.org]
Admittedly, these are not exactly real-world use cases, but they do show the potential.
"A nice company"? (Score:4, Informative)
"I like Adobe â" they're a nice company,"
Has he actually used any of their stuff? Apparently not. Also, according to my friend who works in a Flash coding shop, they can real pricks occassionally.
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Re:"A nice company"? (Score:5, Informative)
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I think Adobe is a pretty cool guy. eh makes proprietary formats and vulnerability-ridden software to read those formats and doesn't afraid of anything.
All I need to know about HTML 5 (Score:5, Funny)
<first post />
Someday maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)
How long until HTML 5 is supported in every browser?
The "good" thing about Flash is that it is a plug in. Flash can be added to just about every browser by downloading a plug in.
HTML 5 will take a lot longer to get into every browser.
I really don't like Flash or plug-ins but in this case it is an advantage and will be for a long time to come.
Oh and NOBODY except Slashdot will write to a standard that IE doesn't support.
Don't be so sure (Score:2)
With IE down to 65% or so, 20% of that being IE 6 users, and dropping at 5%/year the days of IE support being a necessity may be numbered.
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Dream on.
Even if IE is only 20% Support will still be mandatory at least of good web designers/programmers. You don't lock 1 out of five people out of your site. It doesn't matter if that 1 is on IE or FireFox.
But I don't really think that IE is down to 65% I could be wrong but that sounds very low for a world wide number. If it is true then great but IE support will be an evil we have to live with for a very long time.
"good" thing about flash is you can shut it off (Score:3, Interesting)
Flashblock to the rescue right now.
If they make aggravating crap out of of standard HTML, then it will likely be harder to shut down.
Re:"good" thing about flash is you can shut it off (Score:5, Informative)
Why? You can already disable blink, javascript, images and many more "standard" elements.
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Why can't HTML5 be implemented as a plug in?
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Really? Please send me instructions for adding Flash 9 to the Opera browser running on my Wii, or the browser running in my Android G1 phone. I think you mean "Flash can be added to just about every browser running in Windows or MacOS on an X86," which is a considerably smaller set of supported devices. The PC has peaked; the future is internet appliances. When will people stop assuming browser = PC?
Vectors? (Score:2)
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So what is SVG supposed to be?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element) [wikipedia.org]
SVG, an open vector graphics standard, is part of HTML5.
Hey Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Sincerely,
Adobe
Flash uses (Score:5, Insightful)
In current days, Flash is only used to:
- Casual games;
- Boring add banners, like "hit the monkey";
- Video players;
- Webpages menus, when the designer has no know-how to use CSS/Javascript.
Excluding games, all uses can be replaced by web-standards (even videos, in next-generation browsers).
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"- Webpages menus, when the designer has no know-how to use CSS/Javascript."
I disagree.
Flash is a wonderful tool for designers. They can create web sites exactly like they want.
Converting their initial design to HTML/CSS means a considerable waste of time, plus they always have to make tradeoffs because that feature isn't cross-browser and that other one requires high javascript skills.
Or they have to work with someone else. A guy that spends days trying to convert a design made with Photoshop into HTML/CSS
Sure, but Opera is busted? (Score:2)
Opera preaches standards left and right, but the real problem is nobody follows then except Opera. Therefore Opera doesn't work like all the other browsers. I love Opera for the most part and I use two browsers all the time. I would only use Opera, except for the fact that so many websites don't function properly in Opera. (Mostly javascript and css are the issue)
Once Opera functions like all other browsers, I will listen to what Jon has to say.
JavaFX (Score:5, Informative)
JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.
It supports charting, animations, and rich media. Version 1.5 is rumoured to have support for complex form controls, just like Flex.
What's more, it's totally integrated into the Java Virtual Machine, meaning it can use all of the Java class libraries. It even has a mobile component, meaning it's possible to port applications between the desktop and supporting mobile platforms.
To me, this single runtime sounds like a much better alternative that the kludge that is HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX support a multitude of IE6/IE7/IE8/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browser runtimes, especially if there's no framework behind them.
In MOST ways you don't need Flash (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't tell you how many times I've come across a site which uses Flash to show a single, individual picture. Not a stream of pictures. Not a mosaic of pictures. Not a slideshow of pictures. One picture.
WTF? You're telling me it's easier to code a Flash object to display that one picture than it is to throw in a link to the picture? Seriously?
Then you have those sites which insist on having their front page as Flash-only. Brilliant. Just brilliant. How the hell am I supposed to find anything on your site if there is no way to save that link for future reference?
Flash is ugly, slow and just plain annoying. Almost as annoying as punch the monkey. Web designers who rely on Flash to do their work should have their knuckles pounded with a five pound cast-iron doorstop dropped from a height of ten feet then made to punch a punching bag.
Hopefully HTML 5 will cure the web of this illness.
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I can't tell you how many times I've come across a site which uses Flash to show a single, individual picture.
Most of the time I've seen this done it's to prevent casual downloading of the picture. If you put the image up in straight HTML, anyone can Right Click->Save Image As. If you embed it in a Flash object, it's much harder to grab the image.
Unless HTML 5 has a way to prevent casual copying, that usage is not going away.
Re:In MOST ways you don't need Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
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He did say "casual".
Joe Average User is not going to crop and save a screencap using image editing software.
Re:In MOST ways you don't need Flash (Score:5, Informative)
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The reason people do this is is to stop you from right clicking on the image and saving it.
Printscreen > paste into gimp > crop and save, mofo's! Feels good every time I do it.
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And that works because screenshots are hard? o_O
Re:In MOST ways you don't need Flash (Score:4, Funny)
Flash is ugly, slow and just plain annoying.
That's stupid. Flash is great. Flash is the magic that makes youtube possible. I'm all for replacing it with HTML5, but it still is one of the most important pieces of the web.
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I can't tell you how many times I've come across a site which uses Flash to show a single, individual picture. Not a stream of pictures. Not a mosaic of pictures. Not a slideshow of pictures. One picture.
I've heard some people say they do this to prevent picture stealing because people were turning java script off on their browser and could right click on their site.
I explained they could just hit print screen, but I think it was lost on them.
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Adoption beyond Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
HTML5 has a lot of potential, but adoption above and beyond Flash (or Silverlight, etc...) will depend on 2 factors:
1. Implementation Penetration
2. Authoring Tools
Flash's strength is in the tools more than the language(s), Actionscript and MXML. For every 1 Flash "programmer" I meet, I know about 10 people who know Flash well enough to make graphics and simple script work on the time line.
If a majority of the browser users have HTML5 support, and a killer app exists for editing content; I would then put weight towards the possibility of HTML5 trumping Flash.
Don't need Flash? (Score:5, Funny)
</triumph>
already available (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:already available (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't twist history. The reason flash took over web video is because vistors tired of WMV/QT codec hell.
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The reason flash took over web video is because vistors tired of WMV/QT codec hell.
I have quicktime movies from 1993 that still play just fine now, and MP4s have been playable on just about any system for the past 3-4 years... Are you sure the popularity of embedded flash players had more to do with the fact that they forbid the user from downloading, thus providing highly effective copy protection?
You can circumvent it to an extent, but it's just difficult enough that it prevents casual copying.
Really? (Score:2, Funny)
Ignoring the 800 pound gorilla (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unlikely Internet Explorer will die any time soon. So unless the Microsoft developers somehow magically start putting together a browser that is current in support of web standards, Flash and its brethren will never die. It doesn't matter how great the HTML5 support is in Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit (Chrome, Safari) - as long as IE continues to lag, we're stuck ("we" meaning those of us who code pages for the real world).
SMIL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't this was SMIL was supposed to deliver? Is that dead now?
Flash has another advantage (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash is Flash. Period. If your Flash file works in IE, it works in FF, Opera, Safari, etc. It requires a plugin sure, but it's one that's almost universally adopted.
By comparison just about everything else is developed in 2 phases:
1. Write standards-compliant code that's well-formatted and works properly.
2. Fix about 37,000 IE-only bugs, knowing that ~70% of your users are going to be viewing your site with that piece of crap. Additional time is required because IE6 and 7 aren't even consistent with each other in terms of how they piss on the standards. This is especially true with CSS, which IE is absolutely terrible with.
I welcome HTML 5, as I think it has a lot of nice improvements, as well as a lot of stuff that should've been there years ago. We just have to pray that browser support - especially from MS - actually allows us to USE the new features on a regular basis.
Also, one side note: Even assuming Flash is no longer used AT ALL for layouts or content delivery (and I hope it isn't), Flash movies and games will of course continue to exist... so Flash isn't going to die as some are saying, it'll simply be used for what it was actually designed for - creating animations and games.
It has already begun (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at a web development company, and we are already starting to move away from flash and relying more and more heavily on javascript. The motivation is mostly because:
a) the flash development tools are inferior to javascript ones
b) every web programmer knows at least basic javascript, many don't know any flash. Easier to build on basic js than train someone in flash from scratch
c) the flash development tools cost a fortune, the javascript ones are either free or very afordable
In fact, just yesterday I wrote a javascript replacement for a flash script which we use on many of our websites. (a general purpose loop of photos, with animated transitions). The javascript alternative is smaller, faster to load, *smoother animated in most browsers*, and easier to maintain or improve on in future.
We're also planning to do the same for other flash scripts in our code library.
Even when we do still use flash, it's in smaller ways. We will virtually never build an entire page (let alone website) with flash, instead we'll do the website in html and then embed a tiny piece of flash.
For example, a photo gallery will be pure html/javascript right up until the point where you click the "full screen" button. And even then, the flash doesn't exist in the page until you click that button, it is injected into the page and configured using javascript.
There are still some places where we need flash: video, full screen, and proper file uploads. Video will be the next to drop off the list, pretty soon we'll be doing video in javascript/html, with flash loaded in as a fallback in browsers that can't do video in html.
xhtml to die? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sigh. I really hope that HTML5 is somewhat similar to xhtml. I really do believe it went in the right direction in general. Even with xhtml strict pages not displaying at all if they had some unclosed tags. It all in general was working toward having authors writing better, more interpolatable pages.
Is xhtml dead? Will the applicable changes in html5 make it back to xhtml? I get the feeling that MS never implemented xhtml strict because they didn't want to drop the ability to extend it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
XHTML was nothing but a giant waste of time. Microsoft never supported it in IE, and when you think about it: why should they have? XHTML gives you absolutely nothing you didn't already have in HTML 4, it was just a bigger pain-in-the-ass to implement.
A beautiful pipe dream... (Score:4, Interesting)
Come on folks, let's be a bit realistic here. It's been what, nigh a decade, and we still do not have browsers properly rendering stuff as simple as tables and positioning using CSS, DOM, etc.
And while granted that HTML5 may provide a nice alternative for embedding video and audio. If that's all you think Flash is for, than you've never done more than scratch the surface.
Check out Flex, AIR, and some of the 3D libraries for Flash. Experiment with remoting. See what you can REALLY do in Flash.
Check out Sliderocket for an example, or Aviary.
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno, people keep talking about Linux! *rimshot*
(Seriously, that was a joke, not a troll or flamebait)