OT Rant: Re: John C's reply to FLASH: Site Check (spyplane) [LONG]

[Len Harrison]

John,


Your statistics are correct I presume. I read one of Jakob Nielson's pieces

that contrasted the update rate for 3.n to 4.n browsers and it was shown to

be half as fast as previous updating. He attributed this to people not

seeing a big advantage in moving to level 4 browsers and to the transition

occurring from an innovator, early-adapter web population to a more

conservative mainstream population.


Can't do much about the second cause, but the first *really* frustrates me.

The difference between level 3 and level 4 browsers is *HUGE*. We've got

style sheets and dynamic pages now at the baseline. There's a very cool spec

for scripting that Netscape has largely ignored (my second major frustration

web-wise) but Microsoft has implemented quite nicely, at least on the PC.

Personally, I also love the extensions IE has added to their browser such as

filters and alpha channels and especially behaviors in IE 5. ActiveX is

equally awesome and much more accessible than Java. Suddenly pages can come

alive and get very interactive without needing to resort to tools like

Flash. But the world at large apparently doesn't know this.


I do most of my work at work for a limited audience (companies that buy our

software) who will more or less work with us around things like browsers or

at least their revision number. Since some of our apps are Web-based and

none of these will work in Level 3 browsers, I don't have to concern myself

with anything but level 4 at work. In our last major release, our big new

browser-based product was IE 4 only which gave me the freedom to write a

tutorial/wbt for that browser only. This was unbelievably cool!


Flash, by comparison, is extremely limited except for being vector-based and

automatically rescaling which is something I've grown to depend upon very

quickly and wouldn't want to give up. But to do anything significant in

Flash except simple viewer-passive animations, basic branching logic, and

primitive games, you have to have a scripting language. You can't even set a

bookmark within the animation without one. You can't get input from the user

back to the server. You can't do any kind of evaluative logic or most other

significant things like echo and process keystrokes, enable drag and drop,

etc. Fact is you can't do a lot of these things inside the Flash window

anyway, but if you have scripting and a Level 4 browser you can do most of

them with a combination of Flash and DHTML. And if you have IE 4, your Flash

can jump out of its box. So in a way this post isn't *completely* off topic

because at least some Flashers will have a vested interested in seeing Level

4 penetrate the Web world. You might prefer it was level 4 **Netscape** from

personal bias against Micro$oft or your conviction that IE is unstable (I

haven't found that true over 20-30 installations on '95, NT workstation, and

NT server installations. The only problem I ever had was with a machine that

later proved to have a defective hard drive and bad memory. Of course your

mileage may vary.), but you still may have a stake in this.


Question is, how? Is there anything we can do? Or is it too late for that?

When I got into the Web as a consumer, the vast majority of sites were

personal or academic. I knew it was time to upgrade my browser when pages I

wanted to see started generating cryptic inline expressions, displayed

weirdly, or gave me messages that I had to come back with a different

browser. When I started writing Web for public consumption, I based my

choice of tags and scripts on what seemed to be the most common standard in

the Web population I was targeting. For outside clients I'd be sure to

provide a degrade path. For my personal work, I frequently didn't bother.


Now it seems that most people who write Web are doing it commercially for

commercial clients. And it's either extra work and extra client expense to

provide state of the art plus yesterday's news or you can forget about a

significant chunk of your audience which is an advertising no-no. This may

be one reason a lot of people here are using Flash. It's an easy to learn,

light footprint, low bandwidth tool that works cross-platform and

cross-browser.


Still I wonder if there is any way to push people toward upgrading even in

the present crassly commercial Web environment (as you might guess, the

commercialism of the Web is my third big frustration). For example, in

working with clients provide examples of what can be done in level 4 vs.

level 3 in hopes of getting commitment for a dual site. This would mean

bigger bucks but you might also consider giving them a little break here for

the sake of advancing technology. Then what about a sidebar link on the

level three versions of your dual sites that goes to a boilerplate page on

the advantages of level four? You could still pump the client page by

inserting animated .gifs, etc. of the client's level 4 site into the

boilerplate. Make the link something that doesn't take the user away from

the main site by putting it in a frame or a popup window.


What about your personal pages if you have them? Or your corporate page? I

have several sites languishing on the Web which I haven't updated in ages

because of this very issue. Maybe I should take my own advice and build

DHTML plus Flash into them as dual sites and possibly create something new

that showcases each of the two main browsers or at least one that showcases

everything you can do with IE 4 and 5.


I remember the first time I saw the Web in color with pictures. Before that

I'd been in a unix shell using lynx. It was a revelation and a major high.

It was literally amazing to revisit some of the sites I'd spent time on

before. Like a blind man seeing for the first time. I got the same kind of

rush the night I installed IE 4 (which I did before Netscape 4). Suddenly

pages were transitioning before my eyes. Things were sliding into place from

nowhere. Other things were moving around the screen. Text and images

appeared by magic and then disappeared again. One click and the browser was

in full-screen mode. One object would fade into another. I could drag and

drop other objects and have things happen when I did. Subtle font sizes were

a reality. Absolute positioning without tables and dot_clear.gifs. I was in

some kind of cyber heaven, and, even better, soon got to do all of this

stuff myself. Maybe I'm unusual and maybe Nielson and others are right when

they say that things like load time and pure information are what is most to

be prized in web design, though I doubt that anyone here would fully agree

with that. Still I wonder if others wouldn't feel at least some of that same

magic from experiencing everything you can do in level 4. If they only

knew...


End of rant. Thanks for the bandwidth. Sorry if you granted it grudgingly,


len harrison

instructional designer

lenhabtcorp [dot] com

-----Original Message-----

From:

ownershocker [dot] com

 [

ownershocker [dot] com]On">mailto:ownershocker [dot] com]On

 Behalf Of John

Croteau

Sent: Friday, October 09, 1998 11:42 AM

To:

flashershocker [dot] com

Subject: Re: FLASH: Site Check (spyplane)



Hi Eric,


Very nice and innovative design.

http://www.spyplane.com uses the JavaScript: protocol and correctly

sends MSIE 3 users to a Gif page

[deletia]

Version 3 browsers still make up about 30% - 33% of the Web surfers.

Off the Web the numbers are even higher...

[deletia]

It won't be until March or April that we will be able to gauge if there

is any major long term browser upgrade to versions 4+.

[deletia]

I expect we will be around 25% in

version 3 browsers in 6 months.


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

John Croteau

croteauerols [dot] com (mailto:croteauerols [dot] com)

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

FlashTek  (Advanced Websites with Flash) http://www.FlashTek.com/

Flash Central(The Universe Starts Here) http://www.FlashCentral.com/

The Flash Tech Resource (Tech Notes)   http://www.FlashCentral.com/tech/

Need a PC ?  --  Computer King  --

http://www.crownmall.com/computers/



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