Re: Flash as the Vector Standard on the Web?

[John Dowdell]

At 2:44 PM 3/27/98, steven warren wrote:

>Why didn't Adobe ever get their act together with Postscript?  There was

>already software that used to run on Next machines called Display

>Postscript, when the web came along.  I sat there waiting, waiting... for

>them to save us from bitmap only hell.



Raw PostScript was page-description sent to printers. Jim von Ehr of Altsys

and others put together the Encapsulated PostScript Format for data

exchange. Later the Acrobat folder expanded upon this idea of

PostScript-as-container.


But PostScript is verbose. It was not designed for compactness. Artwork in

Shockwave for FreeHand was quite smaller than PDF. The Flash file format is

more compact still.


(You can see this ponderousness in the product literature brochures used on

some websites... large PDF files that would be more compact as HTML.)


PDF can be very useful if you wish to encapsulate printing profiles and

color profiles and weighted fonts and all together into a package for

delivery to the printer. It's also helpful to make sure that tax forms look

perfect. But it's not really up to rapid delivery of design over the web to

consumers... has a different set of goals, and its genesis lies elsewhere

than the web.


jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US


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