[rab777hp]

Flash=Hulu
enough said

[venividivici]

rab777hp said:

Flash=Hulu
enough said

And is this supposed to mean what? is Hulu good? is Hulu bad?

Again, Youtube means Flash... yet Apple turned the content to quicktime for its products and that was allowed.

The time we're living now is as developers and consumers. There is a radical change based on adoption. Now you can not mention that is the technology the only one playing a role. IE cannot and will not survive if they do not adopt to new technologies, and this means adopting standards. When millions of users view content and interact with sites the likes of twitter, youtube, flick'r, facebook, and these sites render content they do, they become mainstream and the standard.

If new technologies like those promised by either Andromeda or Google's WAVE are adopted by the millions of users, it will be this adoption that will face out products such as silverlight and Flash, and browsers not able to render the experience.

[kill953]

Quote: "I am sure what Apple is going to do is really deliver a robust Safari that will implement HTML 5 fully, thus taking advantage of what iPhone already does: Quicktime."
Just one minor problem… HTML5 effects use even more %CPU than Flash! If one of the reasons for not liking or permitting Flash is battery life, HTML5 is most definitely not the answer.

[Steve_S]

kill953 said:

Just one minor problem… HTML5 effects use even more %CPU than Flash! If one of the reasons for not liking or permitting Flash is battery life, HTML5 is most definitely not the answer.

For starters, there is no comprehensive test to support your claim. Second, any HTML 5 implementation out there is an early technology preview before the standard has even been completed. Third, with proprietary technologies like Flash and Silverlight, etc. you're at the mercy of that specific vendor to not only support your platform, but to support it equally. Macromedia / Adobe have produced terribly poor performing product on the Mac side for example. Whereas, with open standards like HTML 5, you get various browsers competing against each other. Look at the recent performance showdowns with regard to Javascript. Do you think that would be possible if Javascript were a proprietary product? You're a bit naive if you think we'd be better off with Flash for performance purposes.

[Steve_S]

SpinThis! said:

Is it necessary to make a whole site in Flash? Usually not but if you're looking to do anything multimedia-related on your website (like any kind of audio, video, accepting file uploads properly, etc.), it's just easier and more compatible to write a little widget to do those things using Flash then dance around QuickTime/Windows Media issues, etc.

As a web developer, you should know that this claim is no longer true with HTML 5.

Quote

HTML5 still doesn't even address some of these things

Nor is the standard complete.

Quote

and who knows when/if IE will actually adopt those standards properly.

Microsoft seems to be getting on the standards bandwagon with IE 8, but obviously they still remain far behind the curve. That are on the right track and this kind of change isn't going to happen overnight.

>That brings up another point: one of the beautiful things about flash is the high adoption rate. Most Internet surfers already have the latest version of Flash and the ones who don't are usually only one version behind so it's generally pretty easy to target older versions.

Sure, that's true right now. In the short term, Flash remains the only real solution for some things. However, most of these "some things" can be avoided. Anyway, the question is more of a long term issue rather than just speaking for the short term.

Quote

And consistency of using the fonts you want and know that the site is going to look exactly the same on whatever platform you use is just great.

Yeah, Apple tried that with Safari 3, but Windows users balked at that attempt. Users ultimately want consistency across their platform, while web developers want consistency of their web page, regardless of how it conforms to the consistency of a given platform.

Flash has filled a missing gap for many years and it served it's purpose. However, the web should be neutral from a technology perspective. We shouldn't be forced to install Flash, Silverlight or Quicktime if we don't want to. Life is much easier when you develop for standards and let the vendors struggle to remain compliant. This is what things like the Acid tests are for. Let vendors like Apple brag for being first to be fully compliant on a spec, etc. That puts pressure on the others, including Microsoft, to follow suit.

[Hamranhansenhansen]

>> Re: Coming soon: Adobe Flash on Android, WinMo
>> and WebOS
> Flash=Hulu
enough said
[/quote]
It's not that simple. The audio video on Hulu is H.264/AAC just like on YouTube and iTunes and everywhere else. The reason Hulu uses Flash is because it's the only H.264/AAC player on a Windows PC. On mobiles, you have an H.264/AAC decoder chip in there to display the video, which is faster and uses less battery power than using a software decoder like Flash which will tax the general purpose CPU.
The big thing happening in video right now is browsers supporting H.264/AAC natively so that Flash will no longer be required. There is a video tag in HTML 5 for example, that already works in modern browsers.
Finally, as a Flash developer, I can tell you that unless the FlashPlayer on these mobiles is 100% bit-for-bit the same as Flash 10 on Windows then it is NOT Flash. The best Flash we have seen on something other than a PC is equivalent to 1998 PC Flash, about Flash 3. If they can't run today's Flash movies it is a different platform. I hope it's the real thing, but I'm not optimistic.

[rab777hp]

Flash compatible mobile devices will make websites create mobile sites- as happened with regular HTML sites.

[doglesby]

>the other mobile platforms will have something to brag about until Apple jumps on board
Or until Flash dies the horrible death it deserves. After all, even Adobe recommends Flash blockers.

[Hamranhansenhansen]

Quote

and who knows when/if IE will actually adopt those standards properly.

The Web is not waiting for Microsoft.

Mobiles outsell PC's every year by 4 to 1. The standard browser on mobiles is WebKit (iPhone, iPod, Android, Nokia, Palm, others) which is HTML 5. The standard media on mobiles is ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC, same as iTunes and Blu-Ray and YouTube and many others. Browsers are building in support for audio video media natively.

When you go to MSNBC.com (a Microsoft site) on a Mac or PC, you get a Flash presentation that shows you H.264/AAC video. If you go there on a mobile, you get the raw MPEG-4 H.264/AAC and it plays on your mobile instead of in FlashPlayer. That is how the whole Web will go in a few years. This is already coming back to the desktop, for example, MS Exchange support in iPhone OS and Android OS lead to MS Exchange support in Mac OS and Android netbooks. The more the Web goes mobile, the more the desktop systems will have to change to be compatible. Note that MS Windows doesn't have Exchange built-in, you have to add it.

You have to understand, Microsoft hardly shipped anything during this past decade. Windows 2004 had to be scrapped entirely, and about half of the Windows 2007 (Vista) licenses were downgraded to Windows 2001 (XP). IE 8 is the slowest shipping Web browser in the world, and does not have a mobile version, even though it is 10+ years since Microsoft got into mobiles, and over 2 years since Apple shipped the first MobileSafari, which is the current version of Safari running on a mobile. If you swap the IE 8 on a PC for Google Chrome or Apple Safari, it's like getting a new machine. There are popular Web apps that IE 8 can't run, many Google apps that run better in another browser or on a mobile than in IE. At some point, this reaches critical mass. You can't get a 2001 view of the Web and compete with the rest of us who are building the hot websites for 2011 already.

One small example: before the iPhone was announced, clients always asked me "the new website will run in IE, right?" but since the iPhone launched, they are all concerned that it runs on the iPhone, that it runs on other mobiles.

So Microsoft will not stop the pace of HTML 5. What would they stop it with? Windows 7 with IE 8, shipping in 2010, runs on generic PC's only? That is a 2004 system at best. They will not even be shipping a 64-bit kernel to all but a tiny percentage of their users. They will not be showing composited graphics to the majority of their users. It still has DLL's and the Registry, UAC, and unique in all the world it has viruses. And again, the browser is just way too slow. The PC monopoly is broken. Not only do we have Macs with Intel but we have Android netbooks and we have ARM smart phones of many kinds, and we have game consoles with browsers and at some point the feature phones will get WebKit and IE 8 will account for 8% of the Web.

Keep in mind also that the 2 biggest corporate supporters of HTML 5 are Apple and Google, who not only successfully shipped products during the 21st century, they shipped a lot of stuff that people are building on. For example, you find Google Maps in every smartphone and on CNN and such, and there are 50,000 iPhone apps just during the past year, more than all of the other mobile apps ever created. Apple started the WebKit project that now provides the Web decoder for every smart phone. Google has pushed the envelope on cloud computing, and with HTML 5, Web apps gain local database storage, courtesy of a lot of Google work.

Finally, the EU says PC makers should pick the browser that ships on their Windows 7 PC's there, and Microsoft has already removed IE 8 from Windows 7. A generic PC maker who ships Chrome is going to ship a much faster system than their competitor who ships IE 8, even though their hardware configuration may even be inferior to the IE 8 system. The difference in speed between IE 8 and the modern browsers is so great that shipping IE 8 essentially amounts to crippling the hardware. A more media-savvy PC maker would ship Safari and iTunes and QuickTime and advertise their system as iPod-ready.

So don't worry about Microsoft's influence on the Web of the next decade. The technology has already moved well beyond them, and users will see the result of this more and more as time goes on.

[flowney]

So far, Flash doesn't seem to matter that much in the mobile space. If we look at all of the mobile browser share results, we see that mobileSafari dominates (89.2% in this survey: http://www.tuaw.com/...access-study/).

Although developers can do some pretty amazing things with Flash, Silverlight and even the old QuickTimes "wired sprites," their customers seem to want nothing much more than some text and a logo zooming around on the front page. That's pretty much it for the vast majority of web sites!

Obviously, mobile web surfers haven't been deterred by the lack of Flash for mobileSafari. Soon, they will see those gratuitous animations again but without the Flash tax which is paid for with diminished performance and security. They will be seeing CSS transforms, canvass and SVG at greatly reduced costs.

[Hamranhansenhansen]

> While I'd prefer to root for the open source
side, the fact that Apple, Google, Mozilla
et. al. really haven't developed the tools and
documentation that content developers need,
I have to wonder whether they are really all
that serious.
[/quote]
Dude, that is HTML 5! The documentation you are looking for is the HTML 5 spec. Creating the documentation you think is missing is the purpose of the HTML 5 project. It is no longer missing. However it is also not complete. But neither was any previous version of HTML.
Imagine if Apple decided to write "How to Develop for Safari" and they heard that someone at Google was also writing "How to Develop for Chrome" and they called up Mozilla who turned out to be writing "How to Develop for Firefox" so they all agreed to collaborate on a single book "How to Develop for Modern Browsers."
That is basically what happened a few years ago. Since then, "modern browsers" (Google's term) has been replaced by "HTML 5." Browser becomes HTML and modern becomes >4.
If you read the spec, you will quite often see that the section you're reading was written by someone at Apple, or someone at Google, or someone at Mozilla. Sometimes, a section is co-written by Apple and Google, or Google and Mozilla.
The key thing is that the spec doesn't just say "here's how to insert an image" and leave it at that. It also says "here's how the browser should display the image that is inserted in this way" and the browser vendors agree on that, so that when the Web author inserts an image it will display the same in all browsers.
For example, Apple created the canvas tag for the Mac OS Dashboard, and submitted it for standardization. During the standardization process, Mozilla changed some things dramatically, and Apple changed their implementation to match the standard. The result is a better canvas tag that you can write for any HTML 5 browser and you can expect it to work in various ways.
Many improvements have been made in this way.
So the documentation is here.
As for tools, you make HTML 5 with the same tools as HTML 4: some variation on the UTF-8 text editor. It is very easy to convert good HTML 4 to HTML 5. Each change is a solid improvement or it wouldn't be in the spec. It's a very practical spec.

[SpinThis!]

Hamranhansenhansen said:

The reason Hulu uses Flash is because it's the only H.264/AAC player on a Windows PC.

What you meant to say was Flash is the only player on a Windows PC users probably already have. Windows Media doesn't do H.264 out of the box (at least on XP, not sure about Vista) but Apple does make QuickTime for Windows you can download and get H.264 playback for example.

Quote

Finally, as a Flash developer, I can tell you that unless the FlashPlayer on these mobiles is 100% bit-for-bit the same as Flash 10 on Windows then it is NOT Flash.

I'll agree here. Unless it works the same on the desktop, Flash on a mobile device is pretty much pointless.

[SpinThis!]

Steve_S said:

As a web developer, you should know that this claim is no longer true with HTML 5.

All the HTML5 spec does is specify the syntax for embedding a movie; it doesn't require browser makers to support any audio or video codec natively. Microsoft has yet to pledge any kind of support for the "flash killer" canvas tag either.

Quote

Microsoft seems to be getting on the standards bandwagon with IE 8, but obviously they still remain far behind the curve.

How about 8 years? There's still a fair amount of people who still surf with IE6. I think people are underestimating how much an influence Microsoft and the corporate world still have. Have you seen some of the corporate zealots on MSDN? I would love to see IE die or a massive push on Microsoft's part to get everyone upgraded and on the same page but until that happens, it's baby steps for the web. I have friends in IT and they tell me they haven't even rolled out IE7 yet because a) 6 works well enough for business Internet and b) corporate policy; c) they gotta test, d) they don't want to break some of the intranet and web apps, etc. I always joke with them, "so you're what's holding the web back!"


>In the short term, Flash remains the only real solution for some things. However, most of these "some things" can be avoided.
Avoided how? You have a client who wants video. Tell them it's not possible because there's no "standard" way to embed? Or give your users mediocre web upload capabilities? (There's still no good way to do an ajax form upload.) Run your business on that philosophy and let me know how it works out for you. (Hint: take a popular site like YouTube or Flickr or Gmail?they all use Flash because is solves their problems with minimal issue.)

Quote

Yeah, Apple tried that (font downloading) with Safari 3, but Windows users balked at that attempt. Users ultimately want consistency across their platform, while web developers want consistency of their web page, regardless of how it conforms to the consistency of a given platform.

No, the issue is in the implementation. Browser makers (aside from Safari) won't do font downloads because there's still no good way to protect them. Microsoft actually has a viable proposal now for doing font embedded but the w3c doesn't want drm in the spec iirc.

Quote

the web should be neutral from a technology perspective.

Of course it should. I agree with you here. But how long are you going to wait for that to happen? 5 years? 10 years? Until everyone on the planet runs Ubuntu? I use standards all the time and most of the time I steer clear of Flash because it's simply not necesssary. But I'm not afraid to use Flash either if that's what it takes to get the job done. Whether it makes sense on the iPhone though? Probably not.

[flowney]

Quote

Dude, that is HTML 5! The documentation you are looking for is the HTML 5 spec. Creating the documentation you think is missing is the purpose of the HTML 5 project. It is no longer missing. However it is also not complete. But neither was any previous version of HTML.

Apologies for not being sufficiently clear. Yes, you are correct in saying that web developers have access to w3c docs and other resources and that's a good thing. However, content is still king and, thus, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are critical to the success of any web-based endeavor. The problem here is that these SMEs are not full-time or even part-time web developers. They have neither the time nor the inclination to pour over the docs that you cite. They require high-level tools and simple, straightforward documentation on how to use those tools before their talents can be used to ignite this revolution.

These are the tools and docs that I'm referring to. Those tools can take the form of Rapid Content Development (RCD) tools such as RapidWeaver and Sandvox and/or the cloud-based authoring tools that are becoming increasingly sophisticated due to frameworks such as SproutCore and Scriptaculous. These examples are still rooted in HTML 4 which is perfectly reasonable given that HTML 5 isn't complete yet.

However, the time to start building these HTML 5 tools for SMEs is now so that they will be ready when the spec and browsers reach mainstream status which may be sooner than we think. Apple and Google could help accelerate the availability of these high-level SME-oriented tools. Currently, they do not appear to be doing that.

Perhaps this is best done by third parties but I'm not seeing that development either.