Re: FLASH: New Media OpEd pushes Flash- opinions?

[Chris Burke]

I'm glad some of you felt compelled to weigh in on this. My original post

could have been spelled out much better. Sorry.


>> Would the disappearance of html cause a serious change in the way we

>> experience the web?

>

>yea. it would not exist.


Okay, really dumb question. What I should've asked was:

"If html became simply a facilitator for multimedia technologies like

Flash, how would that change the online experience?"


>Never put all your eggs in one basket!  When you use a plugin you are at the

>mercy of the compnay that makes the plugin.   It is their proprietary

>technology.  They can do with it whatever the hell they please and you can't

>do anything to change that (unless you rant really loud on listservs :).

>What if someday MM decides to go after the market you are in?  Whoops, they

>already did that...

//snip//

>Flash is owned my macromedia who has shown repeatedly bad decision making.

>HTML is not owned. It is governed by standards organizations (developers and

>engineers not marketing pinheads).


I tend to agree with Rob on most of this. No one company should hold such

power over a medium. A standard owned by no one is certainly preferable to

me and I _have_ seen MM make some dopey moves. Erik asked where MM had made

bad decisions. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the DECK

debacle, but let me say they had alot of us waiting around supporting it

for years while they let it languish. Sound Edit was around before

Digidesign and should have been the first sound editor to make the jump to

pro sound tool (like Peak, Sound Forge or even Cool Edit). But it also

languished in MM hands.

So far they are doing a great job with Flash and I commend them for it, but

still we would be at their mercy if it was _the_ authoring tool. My hope is

that other companies will be able to step up (financially and creatively)

to compete with this great tool.


On the other hand, I am growing old waiting for Netscape and IE to do all

the things they promise largely because of a pissy standards war that

persists and persists. Frankly, I think they both deserve to be unseated. I

love the democracy of the browser and I think all the cool non-pro websites

out there would not be if their users had to learn Flash in order to put up

a page.


<dream>If the W3C made Flash a standard and it became a built-in feature in

all browsers, is there any model that MM could accept to agree to make it

open source? Or is that only something that companies do in desperation? MM

seem to be good at dreaming up news ways to make their software and defacto

standards pay. Maybe they could find a trade off and give Flash over to

developers. </dream> But if they did, what would keep it from becoming

another support issue for the browser companies to fight over and sabotage

each others' versions.


/Chris


-----------------------------

Bong + Dern, Inc.

Sound and Music for New Media

http://www.bongdern.com

(212) 563-7925




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