[OT] Can Of Worms (was Re: Running revlets on the iPad)

[Bob Sneidar]

From an IT perspective, having to supply ridiculous bandwidth to all my users who somehow have found a way to justify access to youtube, I would be happy if we went back to straight up HTML gifs and text! But someone somewhere back in time said, "Hey wouldn't it be great if we had richer content in web pages? Maybe even applications that loaded through the web browser?" (I think the guy ran Microsoft at the time.) 

And as men are wont to do, no one counted the cost. They just started building it, and hoped it would all "work itself out". Security became everyone else's problem. Cost was something the "government" would take care of. Now we have users who do about 3/4 of an hour real work and spend the rest of the time "facebooking" or some other such thing, enabled by all that "rich content". We have drive by viruses that can ONLY infect a machine because of the support for "rich content" in all the browsers. 

I sound like an old geezer don't I? Still, do we really need all this stuff to be productive? I can see some applications for the technology, but look at the price we pay! 

Bob


On Jul 1, 2010, at 2:20 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:

>> HTML5 + JS + CSS3 is the future... it will superseed Flash, eventually.
> 
> I find it interesting that many folks here decry the use of Flash, but would
> be quite happy to have the rev plugin gain more widespread use.
> 
> I would hazard a guess that if Adobe was a small company just starting out
> and came up with the idea for Flash, most people would be quite thrilled.
> But Adobe is giant conglomerate and the general policy for any large company
> is "No mercy!"
> 
> It's not a valid argument to simply say "Flash sucks."  The core ideas
> behind Flash make sense: replace bandwidth-heavy bitmaps with efficient
> vector art that gets rendered with bitmap effects when displayed; store the
> instructions for animation, rather than individual animated frames; use
> efficiently compressed audio that gets decompressed on the client side.
> 
> Obviously, one can argue the implementation could use more work.  And I will
> the first the claim that Adobe so complicated ActionScript that it is
> virtually inapproachable by novice developers (if you don't believe this,
> explain why Adobe developed Catalyst).
> 
> But I'm having a hard time understanding why employing 3 separate
> technologies -- HTML5 + JS + CSS -- is considered an improvement over using
> one.  Because they're "open"?  Does this mean they're automatically better
> technologies?
> 
> As someone who's spent years in Web development and who has spent countless
> hours finding workarounds for Web browser idiosyncrasies and screw ups, I am
> quite leery of this move toward "everything in the browser".  How many man
> hours have been wasted by developers trying to get their Web pages to work
> cross-browser, not to mention cross-platform?  Billions?  Trillions?  And
> now, because Flash is suddenly considered "bad", using a collection of
> separate Web technologies must automatically be "good".
> 
> "But all the modern browsers will support standards and will render
> HTML+JS+CSS indentically!!"  Seriously?  Then what will be the benefit of
> using one browser over another?  Why even have multiple browsers?
> 
> The truth is browsers will NEVER do things similarly if they're competing
> with one another.  Which means the development headaches are are only going
> to continue.  Say what you want about Flash, but it's *one environment*, not
> IE/Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Opera/etc.
> 
> We're 10 years into the new millennium, and things are getting more
> complicated, when they should be getting simpler.
> 
> And we still don't have flying cars.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Scott Rossi
> Creative Director
> Tactile Media, UX Design
> 
> 
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