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Posted by Jim Higson on 09/19/05 01:51
SpaceGirl wrote:
> Jim Higson wrote:
>> Travis Newbury wrote:
>>
>>
>> I'm a bit unsure - are you upgrading a new flash runtime/format or
>> developer tool, or are the two closely tied together? I admit I've never
>> looked very deeply into Flash.
>>
>>
>>>Creating an
>>>application that looks and functions identically on any OS desktop,
>>>browser, PDA, or cellphone is now a reality.
>>
>>
>> Agreed, but not with Flash - Macromedia's Linux support is pretty poor.
>>
>
> Flash 6 player and Flash 8 player are both available under Linux. Also
> Flash Lite (mini version of the Flash Player) is now shipped with most
> major PDAs and even a few cell phones, not to mention being used for a
> UI on at least one games console and several interactive TV set-top
> boxes now.
I have (or at least, think I have) version 7. If 8 is out, for Linux it's
not yet appeared in Macromedia's apt repository, but I'll keep an eye out
for it.
Anyway, the plugin is bad. The sound and graphics always loose sync after a
while, it completely ruins Strongbad.
>> As far as I care, the biggest problem with flash is there is no way for
>> the browser to look at the semantics and filter just the annoying uses,
>> so pretty much everything gets blocked.
>>
>> BTW, has an SVG viewer ever been implemented in flash? If so it could be
>> a good stopgap while we wait for browser support to catch on.
> SVG format is dead. The biggest (almost only) commercial backer is/was
> Adobe, and now that they own Flash (they bought Macromedia) there is no
> incentive at all for them to continue that support - expecially when
> none of the major browsers natively support SVG (you need a fat
> plugin/player for IE - FireFox 1.5 comes with support but that's not out
> yet)
> PLUS Microsoft are bringing out their own rival product called
> Metro built into Windows Vista...
I thought it was called Sparkle. If I remember correctly, Metro is the rival
to PDF (or perhaps, to Postscript).
> It'll be a Metro Vs. Flash fight, and
> I doubt SVG will get a look-in.
I think comparing SVG to 'multimedia' formats like Flash is looking at it
the wrong way. SVG is a graphics format, and as a vector graphics format
has a lot of advantages over raster formats
Flash etc can do some neat stuff, but we can't (and probably will never be
able to) do css like:
background-image: foo.svg;
background-size: 100%;
With SVG this is all possible and will open a lot of really cool things in
HTML styling. In the above example I might have an image that exactly fills
the width of the window regardless of the users' resolution.
For display of simple vector graphics such as graphs on a site Flash is
overkill and doesn't fit in as nicely with the rest of the document.
> There's also a huge technical flaw in
> SVG - the files it generates are utterly HUGE; making it not exactly
> ideal for WWW!
Not really. Looking at some of the graphics I use, which were drawn as SVG
in inkscape but rasterised for the web, in most cases the SVG is much
smaller than the paletised PNGs and rather higher quality since it can be
scaled to any size and never be pixelated.
If size is still a problem, the http response content-type header can be set
to gzip and the XML compressed. Almost all browsers support gzip
compression for all file types and for SVG it usually cuts down the size by
about 70%. (Granted, this could also be done for flash)
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