Macromedia on Monday opened the doors to a new incubation site that hosts unfinished technology and early software releases. The goal of Macromedia Labs is to involve developers in the creation of new products, enabling them to provide feedback that can shape the company’s future moves. Specifically, Macromedia Labs will offer documentation, code samples and technical articles, along with community services such as forums and wikis.
Macromedia Opens Incubation ‘Labs’
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Anonymous
Seems that many people have made up their minds… from a decision they made probably more than 3-4 years ago.
I urge both sides of this argument to take 30 minutes of their time…heck an hour (who doesn’t have an hour to spare…it just might save you a few more in the long run), and explore the “other sides” technology. Talk to developers (true developers) who use that technology.
See what they like and what they hate about the technology they are using. Be a bit more open minded.
And all the linux people who are whining…seriously, suck it up 
OK, this is a blatant off topic troll.
But I hope Flash and Shockwave die horribles deaths.
What’s wrong with Flash? It’s a great platform for all sorts of things.
What’s wrong with Flash? It’s a great platform for all sorts of things.
Its like the old saying “Guns dont kill people, people kill people”… Well “Flash doesnt destroy the web, designers do”. Flash itself is useful technology, although I would prefer SVG to catch on as it can do about 80% of what Flash should be used for doing without the commercial entanglements. The problem with Flash is it is routinely used for things it should never be used for.
1. Display of textual content (with the exception of sIFR, which is a pretty slick solution to a real problem imo, id still rather something else though)
2. And worse still, navigation (or really any linking whatsoever)
If you are a web designer and you do one of the above, you should be kneecaped. Doing any of the above is the equivalent of just making a big image of your webpages and linking to them (it is. really. let that sink in if this applies to you).
The web was designed to primarily as a textual medium. It is not an accident, nor is it a problem waiting for a solution. It is how it was meant to be. Sure, other types of documents can and should be supported, but everything is bound together by html, which is by definition textual. It is the fabric of the internet, without it the whole paradigm breaks down. Pure Flash sites break the paradigm. And the whole point of the web is to serve as a useful, understandable, and consistent paradigm.
Can you place an anchor in a Flash movie? A paragraph? A header? No. You can make Flash render text, or bind some actionScript to a piece of text and have the flash plugin instruct the browser to load a url, but that is not the same thing. The reason it is not the same is because an html parser cannot see it. It simply isnt there. It is just a facimile. It is a foreign language. It breaks the paradigm. The sad part is that usually it is for no good reason.
The problem with Flash is it is routinely used for things it should never be used for.
This applies to most web technology though, especially Javascript and DHTML. But on the flash-side I think things are getting better. Flash is moving more to RIA with Flex and Laszlo rather than overdone webpages.
But flash also makes perfect sense for displaying media on the web. Good examples are streaming audio/video, photograph portfolios, adverts/campain sites etc.
DHTML is a mess to work with. Moz XUL and SVG aren’t very widespread and will most likely never be. So flash is pretty much the only option for cross platform media rich and/or highly interactive websites/RIAs.
streaming video? no just embed the video file and let the system the browser is running on embed the necessary component.
photograph portfolio? Has to be an even more insane suggestion. You can show your photos on a web page! Imagine that, images in an html file!
adverts / campaign sites? flash ads just flat out annoy with their sound and distracting animations.
streaming video? no just embed the video file and let the system the browser is running on embed the necessary component.
Flash has two advantages in this area. First off, it makes it easier for the web developer knowing that the end user only needs flash, and that’s it. If you embed a videofile you need to make sure that the user has the right codec installed, and that can be troublesome since you have no idea which player that’s installed on the client. Secondly with flash you can totally customise the player to suite your needs and looks, making it easier to integrate it with the rest of the site.
photograph portfolio? Has to be an even more insane suggestion. You can show your photos on a web page! Imagine that, images in an html file!
It all has to do with presentation. If you are a pro photographer you want to present your work in the best way possible. Flash makes it easier to present them in an impressive manner with crossfades and a more logical UI.
adverts / campaign sites? flash ads just flat out annoy with their sound and distracting animations.
Again, it’s about presentation. Flash allows much more attractive presentation of products with a smaller bandwidth. They don’t really have to be annoying because they are made in flash.
Besides, you have never seen an annoying gif banner right?
The arrival of new Web technologies cannot be avoided and it’s *good* that they are here.
HTML, as designed and planned when Internet was born, is not suitable anymore for Internet expansion and growing. It would suffice to say that MOST bugs and security problems which affect the Internet are a direct consequence of HTML and its old design. Though HTML is taking a new little breath because of what people call AJAX, in the end, it’s a dead meat.
Flash is one of emerging technology which are supposed to try to exploit real Internet possibilities. It’s not Flash only… but Flash is surely most wide-spread technology for that.
Those of you which prefer to stay hanged to anchors and paragraphs (and horrible CSS), will be able to do so. Others will use new technology to create better and smarter web applications (and yes, a blog is an application… a gallery is an application… everything is an application on the Web today…), safer and richer.
I’m not bashing. I’m just pointing out why such new technologies are gaining ground.
Apart from the fact there is not a single Flash site I like going to including Macromedia’s which is slow and just a plain mess I cannot believe you think that HTML, yes plain text HTML, is somehow insecure when compared with Flash? Its always going to depend the the rendering engine whether it be HTML or flash.
Additionally I see less sites using flash to construct its pages. Yes they include some animations but the site itself primarily uses markup.
“Slowness” is a subjective concept. Line speeds are constantly improving and you can easily get a 1mpbs and even a 4mpbs line for your home connection is Europe (and I guess in US and somewhat in Asia). This way, a 500KB web application is not “heavy” anymore. Things will improve and new comers (locations where the Internet is not present yet) will not start from 28.8kbps lines.
HTML is totally insecure. Greater part of attacks to websites come from HTML/scripting injection or SQL injection (yes, I believe SQL is unsecure by design too). Most attacks will just exploit easy and insecure HTML interfaces to “fool” code and a small part of attacks are very smart. HTML was simply not designed to handle such complexity and all surrounding technologies are dirty hacks to extend HTML. It was handy when lines were slow and data to transfer must be small. Now you can easily load 1MB webpage on popular websites. Crazy but possible.
And no: it’s not true that Flash is used for animations only. I’ve seen many websites using Flash (or Java…but Flash is much more common) to create smart websites or e-commerce websites.
The most important reason because this is not standard yet is because of search engines. It will take a giant step for search engines to be able to index contents using newer technologies. Actually, this cannot be done without establishing a new standard for indexing but you cannot do that while search engines company are competing against each other (namely Google vs MSN vs Yahoo).
The bare fact that Google went into AJAX means it doesn’t wanna help MS / Macromedia / Sun to make users do the switch from old HTML to smarter technologies. MS already has MSN which can be then exploited for their purposes. I wouldn’t be much surprised if Macromedia/Adobe would acquire a search engines and turn it into a new services able to index Flash contents. The biggest problem Macromedia didn’t solve was about indexing Flash movie. We’re all waiting for that since at least 3-4 years.
Yes slowness is relative. The clients bandwidth is not the reason for the pathetically slow loading of the list of dreamweaver plugins for example. Why is it that finding the plugin I am looking for amongst what is only a few hundred entries is painful but when I go to Amazon.com I can browse millions of entries and get what I am looking for quickly. Just scrolling through pages is much faster on amazon.com or seemingly any markup based site. Yet in theory Flash should be quicker because the page is not reloaded?
Moving on though. Flash interfaces force fixed height and width site on on you. Its such a print paradigm and then they try and overcome that by having these ugly scroll areas. Try Flash you will see, its called a ‘Canvas’.
Try doing this in flash. Create a site that has its width measured in EM’s. Specify everything in terms of EM’s. This means that the guy with the 800×600 screen can size the site dynamically as can the guy with the 1600×1200 screen. The site scales with the text. It even works in IE. With flash those poor guys are stuck looking at tiny everything.
People who use Flash seem to think that their site should be a piece of art. They forget that people who actually use the web on a daily basis are there for the content.
Don’t let design distract the user from the content. Content is king. Flash is nice for movie and new product site sometimes though. But you visit those sites once.
Flash is terrible as far as accessibility goes.
Lastly from a development point of view Flash is very restrictive.
Just scrolling through pages is much faster on amazon.com or seemingly any markup based site. Yet in theory Flash should be quicker because the page is not reloaded?
This is very application dependent but in a way it could be. it depends on how application has been designed. In a way, Flash can be handy the way AJAX is but of course Flash is a better environment…
Moving on though. Flash interfaces force fixed height and width site on on you. Its such a print paradigm and then they try and overcome that by having these ugly scroll areas. Try Flash you will see, its called a ‘Canvas’.
Yes, you’re right but this is really by design. The idea behind it is you can develop a website the same way you can develop an application. And yes, it’s a very different concept. For example, according to what I hear, MS removed the ability to specify % values (height, width and so on) in XAML.
Of course, don’t get me wrong:I’m not saying that starting from tomorrow we should abandon HTML! I’m just saying that there’s a reason behind all this.
I agree about accessvibility and yes, Flash is limited. That’s the reason why Java and .NET are so large and Flash plug-in is so compact. However, that’s also part of its success… which way is better? Time will tell 😉
In the UK here. my line speed is 512k, so 500kb is a short wait. However I do not want 1 page sucking up every bit of bandwidth I have. I listen to net radio, I download files, other machines share the bandwidth. The bandwidth is shared, it doesn’t belong to a single page, so 500kb is heavy.
HTML insecure? HTML is just markup, it is 100% secure.
SQL injection is a problem with the backend code talking to the database server, it is nothing to do with HTML or client side scripting. If the backend validates the input it receiving correctly there will be no problem. This is the exact same situation that exists with Flash.
a 1 meg page? Never visited one, and hope never to do so. Correctly written pages should never reach that, by correctly written I mean css based layouts, which generally come in 1/3rd the size of their table based equivalent.
Flash can never be a standard. Why? because only Macromedia can write a flash player. The flash specification license says so.
In the UK here. my line speed is 512k, so 500kb is a short wait. However I do not want 1 page sucking up every bit of bandwidth I have. I listen to net radio, I download files, other machines share the bandwidth. The bandwidth is shared, it doesn’t belong to a single page, so 500kb is heavy.
The fact is lines are faster. Without meaning to be philosophical, they can be faster to download same contents in less time OR more contents in the same time. That doesn’t change the fact my DSL can download at 150-200KB/s. That doesn’t mean every page should be 500KB. It only means that pages CAN be 500KB or 1MB.
HTML insecure? HTML is just markup, it is 100% secure. SQL injection […]
I only mentioned SQL, which would deserve a larger discussion and it’s was not meant to be part of this one. Web applications based on HTML are insecure and securing an HTML web application sometimes takes more time than programming features themselves. Not because application is complex but for the very nature of HTML. Newer technologies like ASP.NET or (maybe) JSF (I don’t know it very well) might help but yet they’re a sort of hack to overcome HTML limitations.
a 1 meg page? Never visited one, and hope never to do so. Correctly written pages should never reach that, by correctly written I mean css based layouts, which generally come in 1/3rd the size of their table based equivalent.
I don’t like this kind of approach to problems. “Hope never to do so”? Why? My line allows me to download 1MB in a few seconds so it would not be a problem to view a 1MB page. That’s why people try to improve speeds. Suggesting a webpage should not be heavier than 100KB makes it all so… 1998… Should we suggest people to stop improving speeds because (after all) designing a webpage heavier than 200KB is an error so we don’t need 4mpbs lines? Of course not…
C’me on… page complexity grows as contents grow and that’s honestly good. I want to have more contents, not less or the same amount I had in 1998. And I’ll tell you more: presentation of such contents today is *NOT* optimized just because markup was not smarter enough. So we have scrolling pages which is a design nonsense, for example, and all those HTML-style things which are frankly gross. And that’s why, for example, MS (AFAIK) removed % values from XAML. This way, designers will be forced to OPTIMIZE their presentation layer and make it well-suited for users instead dependent on how lazy developer is. This is good, IMO.
Flash can never be a standard. Why? because only Macromedia can write a flash player. The flash specification license says so.
Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s not. Honestly, I don’t care very much about this thing. I hope you’re not going to bore me with something like “Macromedia should open-source Flash…”! 😉 Really, that’s something I care less.
You damn retard.
Others will use new technology to create better and smarter web applications (and yes, a blog is an application… a gallery is an application… everything is an application on the Web today…), safer and richer.
* What is unsafe about HTML? Pure HTML is rather safe. Or am I missing something?
* Which of today’s (or even future) web applications _require_ Flash? Site with articles? Not. Shopping site? Not. Blog? Not. Webmail? Not.
* Which of them cannot be done by HTML+CSS or HTML+CSS+AJAX?
I’m not bashing. I’m just pointing out why such new technologies are gaining ground.
You have not pointed out anything. I’m not bashing, I’m merely commenting that your comment included very little facts.
More than that the new technologies (I am not sure its even accurate calling them new technologies) are limiting. Flash is built around the old paradigm i.e. everything is tightly coupled. Loose coupling is more empowering.
Flash is also a binary format. The move today is around human readable formats like XML.
TBPrince also talks about everything being an application. Part of what gives the web its power is it remains primarily made up of documents. Sometimes with a thin layer to help you find your document more easily. Making everything an application is retarded. Lets leave things like Gmail as webapps and items which should be indexed as documents.
What is unsafe about HTML? Pure HTML is rather safe. Or am I missing something?
How many websites you visit every are just *pure HTML*. I can’t remember an HTML-only website… ok, I can remember one but just that one. If I can concede that “pure HTML” is safe, what’s the point in it?
Which of today’s (or even future) web applications _require_ Flash? Site with articles? Not. Shopping site? Not. Blog? Not. Webmail? Not.
No applications *require* Flash. Just *any* Web application would be richer, safer and better if Flash was used. However, let’s not get the focus over Flash. While I like it, I really don’t care if it will be Flash or XAML+ASP.NET or Java WebStart: the only thing I care is to have something better than HTML. Which is rather poor.
Which of them cannot be done by HTML+CSS or HTML+CSS+AJAX?
HTML+CSS means nothing. You cannot develop application with such combination and you cannot develop an application with HTML+CSS+AJAX only because you need server components. However, as I said, I’m not stating that there are things which *cannot* be done (well, infacts there are many, but right now let’s pretend there aren’t), I’m just saying that Flash (or a similar technology) is *better* and more secure)
You have not pointed out anything. I’m not bashing, I’m merely commenting that your comment included very little facts.
I’m not in the mood for silly flaming. 😉 I’m not your enemy but you’re probably one of those kids which cannot discuss without considering other one an enemy. Friend, it’s just web developing! Choose what you want and take it easy 😉
(but HTML is dead… lol)
If I can concede that “pure HTML” is safe, what’s the point in it?
You said HTML is unsafe. I claim otherwise. Nothing more and nothing less.
You cannot develop application with such combination and you cannot develop an application with HTML+CSS+AJAX only because you need server components.
Yes. For an application, you need server components, but you can use various server components to generate the same HTML+CSS+AJAX code. Also, you could use various server components to communicate with the same Flash application. No reason to drag server components into this discussion.
I’m just saying that Flash (or a similar technology) is *better* and more secure)
Care to support this opinion with some facts? You are, of course entitled to your opinion. I’m not on a mission to change it. I’m just honestly curious about why someone considers Flash a better thing than HTML+CSS.
You said HTML is unsafe. I claim otherwise. Nothing more and nothing less.
I meant: since *pure* HTML is not meant to develop “applications” (I guess we agree on the definition of a web application… don’t we?) referring to such *pure* version doesn’t fit in that context. Sure, a car which cannot move won’t crash but I would hardly use such argument to state that cars are 100% safe 😉
Yes. For an application, you need server components, but you can use various server components to generate the same HTML+CSS+AJAX code. Also, you could use various server components to communicate with the same Flash application. No reason to drag server components into this discussion
Again: our discussion was about applications, not markup in general. HTML+CSS+AJAX cannot do anything interesting (well, a calculator maybe 😉 without server support. The environment Flash gives you is just safer and more controllable than matching HTML environment. If you ever tried to develop a Flash app, you should easily know what I mean.
Care to support this opinion with some facts? You are, of course entitled to your opinion. I’m not on a mission to change it. I’m just honestly curious about why someone considers Flash a better thing than HTML+CSS.
If we’re talking about HTML+CSS only, it’s just more secure and controllable. If we’re talking about HTML+CSS+AJAX,in random order:
* richer environment
* more controllable environment
* easier debug
* a consistent behaviour
…
AJAX looks just what it is: a complex hack to overcome HTML limitations. Sure, you can use it and Google proves that you can develop very good applications using it. That doesn’t mean AJAX is still just an complex hack which is ages less comfortable than a consistent environment like Flash.
Now, if you’d tell me “Search engines don’t index Flash contents”, well, that would be a good point…
Proponents of flash have been spouting the same emerging tech rubbish for ages, and not one problem with flash has been solved.
Paragraphs should die yes. I suggest you stop typing them in your comments. It is terrible that a markup language actually markup paragraphs of text to indicate they are paragraphs.
Horrible CSS? http://www.csszengarden.com/
Horrible CSS?