A quick round up of various web-related news items. First up, a new open source product entitled the “Highgate media suite” will bring OGG video decoding to Silverlight. Microsoft have just joined the SVG working group (arguably 10 years late, but it’s better than nothing). Adobe promise significant improvements in Flash 10.1, including Core Animation rendering on OS X and lowered CPU usage. Finally, CoperLicht–a WebGL JavaScript 3D engine (Quake in JS will be here one day)
- HTML5 Theora Video Codec for Silverlight
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Want OGG playback within Silverlight, Mono? Now you can. The Highgate media suite, an open source product, does this. It also provides a JavaScript bridge that’s compatible with the HTML5 video API, allowing developers to script it as a fallback to the HTML5 video tag. Given that all the major browsers that aren’t IE already support HTML5 video, this seems somewhat limited to IE/Windows; nether-the-less, it exists and means that there’s another way to play OGG.
- W3C SVG Working Group Update for January 2010
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Microsoft have joined the SVG working group in order to help iron out ambiguities in the spec, but have kept shtum on whether or not this actually means some kind of commitment to SVG in IE. No smoke without fire, as they say.
- Adobe CTO talks Flash performance on Macs, more
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In a frank blog post by Adobe’s John Nack, the improvements coming to Flash in 10.1 are spelt out clearly. Less crashes, faster, better on Mac. The key takeaways are:
In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.
[…]With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half
Adobe have been getting a lot of flack at the moment as developers bite back over Flash woes in the face of increasing HTML5 support and the iPhone / iPad trying to out mode Flash altogether. The best Adobe can do is be honest—well, the best they can do is make Flash suck less, but the second best thing they can do is be upfront and honest about their plans to solve people’s complaints. I welcome an Adobe who can speak to us this directly and not veiled behind marketing terms.
- CopperLicht – fast WebGL JavaScript 3D Engine
- CoperLicht is a set of development tools to take advantage of emerging OpenGL support in browsers (“WebGLâ€). WebGL exposes an OpenGL ES API to the HTML5 Canvas element. Support is highly experimental at this stage with only Webkit and Firefox nightlies, and no public releases. CopperLicht includes an authoring tool “CopperCube†and a JavaScript library to abstract and manage WebGL for you. The demos include a fly-through of a Quake III level.
Isn’t this sort of like putting lipstick on a pig ?
why are you calling Sarah Palin a pig?
Kudos for doing the right thing(tm) on the Mac.
But does it really need the Ipad hype and backlash to get things moving at Adobe?
They should have had Flash on Mac and Linux as fast as on Windows for years ..
At least HTML5 will get some traction .. that is the only good thing all the Ipad craze has brought to my computing life.
What is even more funny is reading through the comments section with this gem:
How about the fact that Flash sucks, the developers at Adobe suck, their management are locked in a reality distortion field, and long time Microsoft haters are having greater success with Silverlight than with Adobe’s Flash. I truly am sick and tired of hearing the sycophants from forums and the crap employee’s of Adobe bending over backwards apologising for the abortion of a technology that is Flash.
Oh, and to claim that some how because it is installed by many people it equates to a product ‘not as bad as people make it out to be” – who the f–k chooses to use the technology in the first place! I’ve never ever seen a end user install a plugin for something unless the developer of the website itself pushed for its use! so please, to some how equate quality to distribution to people actively choosing to install Flash is a pathetic and fictitious argument to make.
We all know what the solution is – open source the damn plugin; there is no value derived from the plugin – you make the dollars off the development tools. Open source the plugin under a liberal licence and allow vendors to contribute and fix up the problems because so far Adobe has demonstrated gross incompetence when it comes to delivering a stable product. Oh, as for ‘forked versions’ as the Flash apologists in the past here have claimed – institute the same requirements that Java has, “you can’t call it Java unless it has passed the conformity tests”.
Edited 2010-02-06 00:48 UTC
The development tools are actually unparalleled. It’s only the plugin that has issues.
Sadly, the Java plug-in on Mac OS has equally as many issues. And I don’t think Java, JavaFX or Silverlight can match Flash when it comes to ease-of-use for designers creating rich content/apps/animation. Of course, video is something else…
Doesn’t Apple still provide there own Java version rather than simply using the official Java? Last time osX Java was in the news it was due to being a gross number of versions behind the official release leaving Apple customers vulnerable to things long since patched on the other platforms.
I’d like to see both become less important though. A website shouldn’t be unviewable because the browser owner chooses not to install extra content plugins. I’ve even seen support sites that use Flash for the menu system. A support site for a company providing products across platforms yet locking it’s customers out through the requirnment of flash and Adobe’s lack (for those many years) of a 64bit Flash player.
Web developers who use closed crap and can’t build websites that degrade gracefully need to go back to school. Managers that won’t give the developers who are competent time to produce a properly built site also need to give there head a shake or find a new industry to middle-manage in.
Yep, that’s right. There’s a pretty general consensus among Java developers that Apple is doing a crap job of handling Java on their platform (mostly because it’s years late), yet strangely enough Macs are still very popular among Java devs. Ultimately everything would be probably be better if Sun/Oracle were to handle the Mac port, but for whatever reason (possibly because of some secret agreement with Apple) they don’t. Even if Sun/Oracle were to take over the development, they would need to buy out Apple’s proprietary JavaVM code, since at the moment there is nothing comparable in OpenJDK.
Couldn’t agree more. Luckily I think the days of Flash-based menus and such are mostly behind us, as there seems to be an growing pool of web developers who actually have an inkling of a clue. Also, the capabilities of HTML/CSS/JavaScript have expanded to cover much of the simple eye candy that Flash used to be used for.
Agreed – the plugin tool would allow Adobe to allocate more programmers to other projects whilst all the Linux vendors would jump on board to improve it, Apple, and many hand set makers as well. It would definately change my opinion of Flash from being bane of my existence to something I find a joy to use.
For me I have never had any problems with the Java plugin on Mac OS X then again the only time I’ve see/used it recently was using the website called adrive which Java is employed for the uploading process.
As for JavaFX, if it were a choice between Silverlight, Flash or JavaFX (Java itself doesn’t compete with Silverlight/Flash, only JavaFX does), I’d sooner see that succeed as long as Oracle are willing to get it to support more CODECs besides just the one it supports today – On2 Video VP6. What they need to also support is h264 and VC1, and possible OGG/Theora if they have time. All of that takes money and I can understand with the limit funds of Sun it wasn’t possible but Oracle should see this is great potential technology for the future.
People complain about flash like they complained about java applet of the old days.
And people have been praying HTML5, video tag and WebGL as the internet savior.
Point is that as we let designer go crazy on the design and put everything they want in a website and making up some crazy requirement for the website we won’t get out of this crazy cycle.
Of course web application are marvelous, and Flash being strong on IE on Windows platform, has been a big problem for alternative platform.
But hey going monolithic is apparently the way of the future, no middle ground, tighter control. Apparently even the advanced users seems to head that way.
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying all along.
No matter what the codec is, the result is more and more crap. With HTML 5.0 it is probably going to crap so wide that even regular “internet surfers” get annoyed.
Las Vegas and TV commercials. That’s pretty much it.
Edited 2010-02-08 12:59 UTC
From my own experience, Flash have never, ever , crashed on me, but, it can get a lot better. there is a lot of room for improvement, the problem I experiment every day is false video loading, I have to reload the page a couple of times to make it work.
Flash may be for animation, but definitively, is not for video.
Edited 2010-02-06 03:19 UTC
Yes, they are strange times we live in – when a technology originally intended for vector animation and simple games is the de-facto standard for web video.
I don’t typically complain about spelling or grammar, but “nether-the-less”? What the hell?
I like old words and word forms. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nethertheless
Nitpicking galore IUAM.
Anyways, will you integrate that Silverlight Theora decoder into Video for all humanity?
PS: I saw Micro Men and Clive Sinclair is the british Steve Jobs
1. I don’t want to help make Silverlight the next Flash.
2. OGG in Silverlight is only good for IE users, and IE users already have Flash.
3. It would bloat the code, and the goal is to make it smaller over time as we ditch layers (QuickTime can go once iPhone OS 2.0 is gone)
By 2012 the smart phone market is going to be a solid part of society. The Olympics are going to be broadcast online using Silverlight. This is inherently incompatible with a lot of smart phones, by which time Microsoft may use this fact to sell a lot of WinMo7 phones.
Microsoft don’t want an open web. They want the same web they had in 2001. Silverlight is their ticket back there by making interoperability require Microsoft at every stage. I’m not going to touch Silverlight with a barge pole.
I agree 100%, I just wanted to know.
But it is called Video for EVERYBODY and a windows mobile device with silverlight but without the video tag and without flash is a possibility. Would you reconsider once such a device gets traction?
VfE is just a simple template (an obvious one at that)–it’s free for anybody to modify. I won’t put Silverlight into it (as before, the plan is to remove things, not add them), but anybody could quite easily add Silverlight to it, I won’t stop them.
But a WinMo device should play the MP4 file download anyway, if it supports it. HTML5 video is just literally handing a video file to a browser and saying ‘here, play this’. Why anybody would want to then wrap that simple process in a plugin architecture, and framework system, I don’t know–especially on a mobile device of all places. Simplicity and the fewest number of levels between the video and the hardware the better. That is why MS don’t get the web. HTML5 Video is the solution to video on mobile devices, period. If MS write Silverlight into WinMo, but not HTML5 video they are truly shooting themselves in the foot, and as said before, yet more proof positive that Microsoft are against an open web.
“That is why MS don’t get the web.”
They don’t want to get the web and they don’t want anybody else to get the web either
I love Silverlight, I love C# and I love my beautiful Windows 7 and Office 2010. I won’t touch anything fugly like HTML5 with a ten-foot pole.
I love media, I love programming languages, I love OSes and productivity apps. I love the technology landscape, not the specific implementations, because they come and go.
Are you joking? I also love C# (especially), Windows 7, and Office, but I despise Silverlight (when used for video). I wouldn’t mind it being used for online games, where it is definitely superior to Flash, but you would have to be out of your mind to use it over HTML5 for video.
You would if you wanted smooth streaming (and that’s what a lot of content providers want these days).
The HTML5 video tag can’t do smooth streaming.
What? I have no clue what you mean; it seems smooth to me…
(Can you provide more information?)
So let’s cater to iPhone 2.0, but catering to Windows Mobile and IE is an unforgivable sin?
Silverlight and HTML5 video tags really have nothing to do with each other. One is a RIA framework which happens to play video, and the other is simply a mechanism for playing video.
There are obvious advantages on both sides, but claiming that one is preventing the other, or is in place only to prevent the other, is stupid.
Look at the majority of Silverlight apps, they are usually LOB RIAs and not video streaming solutions. That’s just one facet of the platform.
It is counterintuitive to suggest that Microsoft is opposed to HTML5 when it co-chairs the W3C HTML working group.
I’m afraid that is just not the case. In fact, MSs past behaviour and their unwillingness so far to implement HTML5 support in IE suggests the it is counter-intuitive to think anything else.
Silverlight shows all the signs of the usual MS behaviour, i.e. their implementation of a partner’s technology in a cheap bid to hook more people to their platform. What they are doing with Silverlight is nothing new and has been repeated ad nauseum throughout their history. I just don’t understand how people can’t see that.
We’ve heard about Microsoft departments trying to do each other in, and Silverlight / IE is one of those areas of divide when it comes to Microsoft.
I do hope that IE9 is an awesome browser with Canvas, SVG and Video, but Microsoft have committed to nothing other than rounded corners and anti-aliasing; what a joke.
The more IE supports the standards, the more that conflicts with Silverlight which is trying to usurp those standards. This doesn’t sound like a company that understands the web very well.
Instead of making Silverlight at all, they should have first maxed out standards support in IE, then developed professional friendly design tools much like Flash studio that compile into HTML/JS/CSS/SVG and so forth; and anything they wanted to do that couldn’t be met by the standards, implement them in IE only and submit those features to become part of the standards. Both Canvas and Video (and Img by the way) were proprietary first and then accepted by other vendors and turned into standards.
But what’s the business case for improving IE, for Microsoft?
It’s not like it’s a source of revenue, and they can’t really use it to subvert the web anymore. They need Silverlight for that.
Well it is in their best interest to keep people from using alternative browsers since IE defaults to bing.
It’s also easy to manage IE with active directory so in a sense they are selling IE to enterprise customers.
The AD management in IE is it’s one saving grace.
That’s a lot easier said then done. With Silverlight they wanted to bring the .net framework to the web and the cleanest way to do that is with a blank slate. With ASP Ajax they ran into problems trying to shoehorn .net into technologies that were really not designed to be pushed to that extent. The other benefit with a plug-in is that you get a consistent user experience. When you start manipulating HTML/JS/CSS in a complex manner you run into browser quirks. With a plug-in you have control over the rendering engine.
I think their main mistake has been not making a commitment to alleviating concerns over lock-in. I’m not just talking about Linux but also mobile platforms. But they have been much better to Linux than Adobe has ever been. If you recall there was a long period where Flash in Linux was a full version behind and Adobe didn’t care at all.
It is also a different time than the IE6 days. With OSX having ~12% share in the US they cannot lock Siverlight to IE or Windows. Web developers would use something else if they did. They have to push Silverlight on technical merit.
I suspect one of the main motivations behind Silverlight is to provide an alternative to Flash for security and stability reasons. They probably got sick of looking at IE crash reports that showed Flash as the leading cause.
Amen. Someone finally speaking some sense.
It would be very simple for Microsoft to eliminate concerns over lock-in surrounding .NET and Silverlight.
All they need do is (1) to remove Windows-only parts, such as COM, and (2) to make an irrevocable pledge that anybody may write their own implementation under any license terms of any part of it, or of all of it, including Windows.forms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET, and the VC1 codec, for any platform. If Microsoft are concerned about interoperability, they could provide test cases so that other non-Windows implementations could verify that they have a valid implementation (as is done with Java).
After all, anyone may implement Java or Flash for any platform under any license terms.
As long as Microsoft continue to fail to make such pledges then, given Microsoft’s past behaviours, continued concerns over Microsoft’s intentions regarding lock-in are perfectly valid. Indeed, such concerns are probably mandatory, considering the complexity of interoperability with a system such as .NET and Silverlight, and also considering that in the past Microsoft have shown that they are unable even to make a plain simple ASCII text file interoperable with existing standards.
Edited 2010-02-08 06:00 UTC
I am not sure I get this right.
Are they treating Linux better than Adobe because they haven’t released a Linux version at all or because it is now 3 full versions behind?
No need to insult Sir Clive.
Saw this in ad here on OSnews (only because Mozilla have bumped the Firefox trunk version number).
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/websitespark/
This is Microsoft’s view of the web.
It makes me chuckle a little bit to see Adobe now so concerned about the performance of Flash now that Silverlight is being used more. I still mostly see Flash videos sites and stupid take-over Flash advertisements. I still have pages lock up on me because of the Flash plugin. I think the only useful example of Flash I have seen lately is streaming HD videos of the A-Team from Hulu and maybe some of the interactive financial applets on Etrade. I still can’t believe web designers create menus in Flash instead of just using HTML and CSS. There should be a special place in Dante’s hell for Flash based navigation created by web designers using Dreamweaver.