Comments on: How Flash Can Join The Open Web

By: Tommy2Hats

Tommy2Hats — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:13:48 +0000

You’re right on with this post. From the Internet marketer’s point of view, and I don’t mean enterprise, rather the entrepreneurs out there working in companies with <50- employees, the lack of open Flash is becoming a deal breaker. The cutting edge of marketing doesn’t include much Flash at all, which is crazy given that integrated video is right here now. The reason is that Flash doesn’t fit with the fundamental building blocks of the internet: hyperlinking, text and mark-up (tags). Until it does, we’re gonna stick with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to get our message out there. Web developers are kludging, rather than hacking, to get their animations into their sites. This is ultimately a dead end street, or worse, a path to some sort of shell that allows crawlers to peek around, rather than scrape directly from, the content. Mashing is the shiny ball of Web 2.0 and it requires content -not placeholders.

By: davesrc

davesrc — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:30:42 +0000

@Zaach: +1.

>> 6. Mashable, Searchable, and Integrated
+3

Searchable <– first
So it needs Data, View separation (i know it sounds very stale ;) , so apologies)

Mashable <– next

– my $0.02

By: zaach

zaach — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:31:16 +0000

Imagine if you could embed Flex markup directly in HTML and have it rendered, sort of like you can do with XUL in Mozilla browsers.

By: moodie

moodie — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:49:03 +0000

Open source is going to be the predominate business model of the future, so I think Adobe should move to take advantage of that sooner rather than later, before someone like Microsoft (I know, as if) see the opportunity first and move to drastically increase the community and developer base. I know I’d be much more inclined to work with something like Silverlight if it was open and able to integrate with the open web as opposed to Flash as it stands now.

By: fortybillion

fortybillion — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:04:53 +0000

@joshtynjala:
Interesting, I had missed that announcement.

By: joshtynjala

joshtynjala — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:13:49 +0000

fortybillion mentions opening up the spec. It’s important to note that SWF and a couple other formats used by Flash Player are open. There used to be a restrictive license on the spec, but Adobe removed that earlier this year. They branded it as the Open Screen Project, and anyone can build a competing Flash Player implementation using Adobe’s spec.

By: fortybillion

fortybillion — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:40:49 +0000

I don’t believe Flash can ever join the Open Web. It simply wasn’t engineered that way, and opening up the spec for other implementations would fracture the one advantage Flash does have — a single runtime.

As JS interpreters and browser renderers get faster, I think Flash will just be superseded by Canvas and other HTML elements.

By: Vordreller

Vordreller — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:13:07 +0000

I’m suprised that there is no metion of Sun’s project to create a flash-like language, namely JavaFX

Some info: http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/

and: http://www.javafx.com/

When I say it’s flash-like, I mean it in the sense that both languages are used to create Rich Internet Applications

By: ThomasHansen

ThomasHansen — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:59:11 +0000

The problem is that every single piece of incentives goes out the window for them if they do this – except for that they get to piss of MSFT though that is … ;)
.
And I am not sure if “pissing of MSFT” is a strong enough incentive, even for Adobe. But it would be cool. I too actually agree on this. FOSSing Flash would be a really good start. And I would permanently stop bashing Adobe for being “ActiveX2.0″ if they did … ;)
Fact is I would even start creating components for it in Ra-Ajax :))
.
(Note though that I am NOT talking about some shim operation here then, I am talking about the *real* (and full) thing – FOSS the whole thing…!)
There is *one* incentive for it too I guess which is to “give MSFT a blow” which they could need since MSFT have been eating their domains for quite some time now (Photoshop, PDF etc)
As in; damaging_MSFT == helping_Adobe…
.
Why on earth do Google support Silverlight BTW? (Chrome)
I mean obviously you’re VERY scared of Silverlight (and you should be) but then why one Earth are you supporting it in Chrome…?
Ditch it! That would be a message! And with your new V8 engine, why don’t you rewrite the “Chess Silverlight(JavaScript match” to make IE use Silverlight to combat Chrome in JavaScript and then get Chrome beat the hell out of them! THAT would be newsworthy….!!

By: TNO

TNO — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:50:06 +0000

The only foreseeable way that will happen is if there is a profit motivation to do so, or lack thereof for them to care. I see it following the path that Tamarin did honestly