Posted by SpaceGirl on 10/05/07 14:52

On Oct 5, 2:58 pm, Ben C <spams...@spam.eggs> wrote:
> On 2007-10-05, SpaceGirl <nothespacegirls...@subhuman.net> wrote:
> [...]
>
> > Flash itself is a web browser. It's also a virtual machine, we an
> > extremely powerful programming language at its core.
>
> Isn't its programming language very similar to/the same as JavaScript?

In structure yes - meets the same ECMA standards as JS. The language
itself has a lot of depth, supports E4X as well. It's more like Java
than JavaScript to be honest.

> > It leverages the kind of functionality that can only be dreamed of
> > with JS and traditional HTML.
>
> Does it leverage anything that can't be dreamed of with JS and HTML plus
> SVG?

Yes. SVG is VERY bloated. JS also runs about 1/10th speed of Flash,
and lacks all of the video and graphical capabilities. Remember Flash
contains a state of the art video codec, hardware acceleration, can
talk to a video camera and your sound card, your microphone, can embed
fonts, can render HTML, can parse XML... all internally, across most
platforms, without any add-ins. JS doesn't even come close to this.
SVG lacks any of the animation stuff, and generates huge output.
Neither JS or SVG are cross-platform thanks to each browser rendering
pages a little differently. Neither support video or audio. JS has
almost no graphical functions, let alone an awareness of time an
motion. Etc.

We're talking about different creatures here... it's *extremely* hard
to generate these kinds of rich experience, if not bordering on
impossible, with JS.

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