Son of Blob
Adobe has decided to partner with Yahoo and Google, specifically, in order to enable search engine access to Flash contents. In other words, web builders that use bad web practices have been rewarded, and can continue to use Flash to completely build their sites, without regard for accessibility or an open web. The site designers do not have to worry their pretty little heads any longer, because the big boys have come to an "arrangement of mutual benefit", and have decided that no, their shit does not stink.
I'd like to think that one reason Adobe is making this move is because it feels threatened from competition by SVG, but even a fangirl like myself has to acknowledge that much of this is probably related to recent moves into the animation and rich content field by other not-to-be named competitors. Besides, what chance does an open sourced, and openly accessible, technology have against such attractively packaged vendor lock-in? I mean, Google, Adobe: what more would we want?
We should just quit work on HTML5, right now. RDFa, too, not to mention microformats. Forget that semantic markup stuff, and the debate over ABBR. Who needs SVG, anyway? We have Flash, and Flash can be searched. The web has arrived.
Comments
the valley heeds the call of its master ;-) Douglas Engelbart. seriously now that "ActionScript" is self-hosting JavaScript (a.k.a. lisp); its not all bad.
I too am disappointed at the triumph of flash (SWF) over substance (SVG). But all is not lost. The Flex SDK supports adding metadata, including RDF to SWF.
Frankly, Mike, even with the metadata support, I still don't care for SWF. It is vendor controlled, and is still mostly a proprietary blob.
The SVG folks--and I include myself in this label--will just have to start producing compelling reasons to switch from the Flash.
Okay, so...what's a compelling reason?
If I can annotate it, index it, and have great tools to create it, why should I abandon it? It works. It's ubiquitous. And I can do things in it that I can't do (or can't do relatively easily) in plain ol' (X)HTML/Javascript/SVG.
It's a closed technology, proprietary, uses a lot of memory and machine CPU, isn't accessible, isn't semantic, isn't web like.
Even now, talks between Adobe and Microsoft have failed, which means Microsoft's search is left out in the cold. With open technologies, like SVG, you don't have to ask permission from some vendor to access information that should be available to everyone.
Plus, the tools to create Flash are quite expensive. The tools to create SVG? Free.
- Flash is closed? Hum...
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200611/110706Moz...
- Memory and CPU are commodities. Browsers are pigs already, so what's a little more?
- What does "web-like" mean? Are mp3 files web-like? Quicktime movies? Only bits that are human-readable?
- Why *would* MS license any flash technology? They're competing with Silverlight. Sun too with JavaFX. No surprise here.
- IDEs cost money, but the core is free to download. And when it comes to tools, you get what you pay for. Inkscape for example...hate it. Maybe there's something better out there, but I haven't run across it. Suggestions? Illustrator CS3? ;P
I kind of get the sense that your beef with Flash boils down to the fact that it's not markup-based and therefor is more difficult (but not impossible) to write tools that can manipulate it and do fun stuff with the data. True I suppose, but I'm not sure that makes it evil.
Anyway, thanks for the post...they're always thought provoking, even if I don't always agree. :)
Brian, I have to repeat myself: Flash is closed, and proprietary. The open source initiatives you link are related to Flex and ActionScript. Consider the current announcement: Adobe did not release something that all search engines could use; it worked with Yahoo/Google and said it might work with others. That's not "open".
As for the media types being un-weblike, people don't normally use MP3s to build a complete site.
Microsoft does have a search engine. Now, it's effectively disallowed access to searchable stuff because of competition with Adobe, which gives Google/Yahoo an unfair advantage. I image the Justice Department will probably look at this decision when it reviews other aspects of the Google/Yahoo deal for possible anti-trust activities.
As for the tools, Inkscape improves, at no cost to its users. I know the idea is that people working in graphics are rich, and can afford all the Adobe tools, but that's not necessarily true.
Flash is a big blob. We cannot learn from the blob, read it (unless you're Google/Yahoo), or benefit from the semantic richness of the blob. It just sits there on the page. It's not "evil", but it's not useful.
Thanks for the note! I like a spirited debate.
Shelley- Forgot to include this gem :)
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_to_publish_flash_file_fo.php
Adobe is today announcing the "Open Screen Project" which will seek to create a consistent runtime environment for rich media across a myriad of devices. In other words, Flash on the web, mobile, desktop, television, and other consumer electronic devices. As part of this initiative, Adobe will be releasing the file format specifications for Flash (.swf and .flv/f4v) and removing all licensing restrictions involved with the Flash format. In the future, the project will be expanded to include AIR.
I guess they're following through...here's the SWF spec: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/swf_file_format_spec_v9.pdf
Given this, I wonder why did Google needed a deal at all? Why would MS or Yahoo....or anyone?
I'm curious what kind of things you can't do (relatively easily) in XHTML/JS/SVG. I admit that I'm not a Flash user, so I'm genuinely curious. Other than video, what other high-profile use cases are left lacking using the open web stack? Of course I'm interested in this list of cases so that I can attack some and prove that they are do-able ;)
Shelley, your comment above is exactly the right response - keep improving HTML5, SVG, creation tools, keep producing excellent documentation and examples and rely on openness winning out in the long run.
PDF is not a great standard either, yet indexing that was a good thing, and it's useful enough for you to generate it too. It comes down to the difference between an API and an open spec. If people can interoperate without knowing of each others' existence, the spec is a success. If you have to make a business deal to interoperate with a blob, then fewer will do so, and the blob will be displaced by the open standard.
Kevin, PDF is not the same as Flash. No one is trying to replace the web with PDF.
By indexing Flash, designers won't even bother to create semantic, accessible web content. We'll be stuck with Flash only sites and Google indexing.
I hope you're right on the open standard.
"Kevin, PDF is not the same as Flash. No one is trying to replace the web with PDF."
Shelley, surely you remember that Adobe did actually try to do just that, about ten years or so ago? They had a big push that included embedding Quicktime videos and other multimedia into PDF (Acrobat 4.0, I think). Of course, this was equally an attempt to unseat Shockwave and Director.
I think the balance of power here is as follows. Google wants to index all the world's information. A portion of that information is in flash. They're willing to do a deal to get it.
I think people will do svg to get away from adobe. Expect to see svg play a role in apple products.
Apple's commitment to SVG provides hope. If SVG plays a big role in iPhone, the spec will get a huge boost.
I'm not a fan of Flash (or more specifically, of the way it's typically used on the web today), and for many of the reasons you mention, Shelley, but I do want to note that the idea that Flash is inaccessible is outdated. It is entirely possible for a conscientious Flash developer to make a Flash experience that's accessible. Macrodobe has one of the top accessibility experts in the world on staff in the person of Bob Regan ensuring that Flash can be accessible. Independent developers like Thea Eaton have proven that it's possible to make accessible Flash-based experiences.
Sadly, too few Flash developers know this, care about this, and act on this. So the effect is as if Flash were inaccessible in much the same way that much of the HTML on the web was inaccessible in, say, 1999. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Ralph, thanks for the correction on the accessibility. I must admit to not being up on Flash as much as I probably should be, having written a book on graphics. But I refused to cover both Flash and Silverlight in the book. I guess I'm an open source snob ;-)
I should download the Flash tool for a thirty day trial and see how the thing works. I've been reluctant, because I can't afford to buy it, and I can get all I need from SVG.
I appreciate Bob and Thea's hard work to make accessible Flash. Perhaps someday they'll have the tools to do the same with SVG.
I used one a Technorati called Ming for my animated chart generation (at the time, no browser had SVG support)
True, I forgot about Flash generators. There are several that create slideshows, as well as charts. I tend to think of Flash as Flash, the application. Hopefully these same generators will eventually be generating SVG/HTML/JS/CSS, if they aren't already.
I think it's also important to reaffirm that Flash is not an open specification. Yes, open source versions of the Flash player are under development, but these have been derived from reverse engineering behavior.
In addition, Flash is not right click viewable. True, you don't need to see how everything is created on the web, but the web has long fostered a tradition of learning-by-view-source, something that, as far as I know, is not doable with Flash.
In addition, I haven't a clue how one would embed new metadata or even any data into Flash files. I can do so easily into SVG because it's XML. Whatever an application can't process, it just ignores.
Even now, with this announcement, everyone is jumping up and down, without stopping to think that because of the competitive nature of Adobe and Microsoft's business with each other, Microsoft's search properties will most likely not have access to the functionality that Adobe is provided for enabling search. Not unless the Justice department intervenes, which I think it will.
Flash is not open. Bits of a whole are not the whole.
I was thinking about video codecs the other day, specifically H.264 vs Spark, and how they might play out on the iPhone and other new devices. Fragments of news posts wandered into memory:
* the limitations laid out by Apple's iPhone SDK for interpreted languages (but not javascript).
* Word of Apple's supposed interest in the Sprout framework (Javascript)
* The lack of current Flash support in iPhone and iTouch
* Remembering when Apple's stock was at $14, and rumors of Adobe stopping development for the Mac
* Apple's adoption of KDE
* Webkit recently revealing a speedier new javascript interpreter
* widgets!
Hmm. These tealeaves might be suggesting that Apple has no desire to place the future of iPhone/iTouch/future hardware apps in a closed source system provided by another vendor.
Someone asked me the other day if they should be learning Python or Ruby for future web projects. Both are interesting and worthwhile, but right now I think I'd put my money on learning javascript. I think we'll see much more open systems in the devices to come (Android anyone?).