What's The Verdict, Web or Not?

[Bill Marriott]

Sure they had problems, and they were also released many years ago. The 
point is that a plug-in is well within possibility. Look at Director, which 
basically started out as a clone of HyperCard. They certainly deliver as a 
cross-platform plug-in that works. Flash achieved ubiquity and even bundling 
with Windows. That is also comparable with Rev.

I don't know what you mean, really, by suggesting that such a plug-in 
doesn't make "technical sense." You seem to be mixing the technical 
challenge of creating such a plug-in with the technical challenge of writing 
a stack that would run in a plug-in. As far as creating the plug-in 
itself -- sure, I don't presume that to be easy. (Nothing worthwhile is!) 
But, writing content for the plug-in should be as simple as setting the 
stack size to the size of the region you want in the browser window and 
going to town.

As for end-users "walking away" at plug-in installation -- there is a 
percentage of viewers lost every time you click even a plain-jane HTML link! 
That doesn't stop people from creating links. If your content is 
useful/interesting enough, people will view it. It's much easier to get 
someone to install a plug-in than it is to get them to download a player. 
And honestly, it's a lot safer to download a plug-in (the executable is from 
a known publisher) than to download a standalone.

If you look at the standalone download process on Windows, you get a warning 
when you download the file, and two warning dialogs before you can run it. 
Talk about people walking away! And they really should! Rev doesn't (and 
can't) stop anyone from writing a standalone that completely munges your 
system. But a web plug-in would provide a "sandbox" environment where it 
would be reasonably safe to try out new content.

Unfortunately, I would tend to agree with you that it will "never happen" --  
first because of the defeatism I've seen in the discussion thread; second 
because people seem quite satisfied to cook up elaborate workarounds for 
specific applications (i.e., export to DHTML); third because there are still 
300 more-pressing enhancements needed in Rev (e.g., decent table objects); 
and finally because the overall rate of improvement/entropy in Rev precludes 
major new functions like this. (I'm still using 2.6.1 because 2.7.x remains 
much less stable.)

I just hope that people don't confuse "won't get it" with "don't need it" 
... even if that is a sound psychological coping strategy.


"Brian Yennie" <briany at qldlearning.com> wrote in 
message news:80469c8ba243e57fdbdac667be568b82 at qldlearning.com...
> Supercard's plugin - "Roadster" was extremely buggy and Mac-only. 
> Hypercard was demonstrated as becoming integrated with Quicktime - not 
> quite the same as a browser plugin and no guarantee of anything in 
> particular.
>
> Both efforts ultimately were total failures for one reason or another, and 
> neither product had a fraction of the toolset of Rev. They weren't even 
> cross-platform. Note that Supercard is still alive, but the browser plugin 
> is not- and it's still Mac only.
>
> A useful browser plugin for a Rev-like tool doesn't even make much 
> technical sense. Sure, there are instances where an HTML export can work 
> (say you are building a slideshow app) or a Flash export of your 
> animation, or a Quicktime export of something else. There are other tools 
> for delivery in a browser. You are much better off learning some of them, 
> than trying to make Revolution live inside a browser window. Not too 
> mention that if your product really MUST live inside a browser window, a 
> large portion of many markets will just walk away when you ask them to 
> install a new plugin.
>
> I don't mind if people really want to keep discussing this and find it 
> interesting, but please consider the evidence that it's extremely unlikely 
> to happen anytime soon - and quite possibly ever.
>
>> Not impossible. As I mentioned earlier, Apple demonstrated a browser 
>> plug-in
>> for HyperCard. SuperCard had a similar plug-in. Such a facility would
>> dramatically increase the value of writing in Rev. "Quite magical," 
>> indeed.
>>
>>
>> Rick Harrison wrote
>>> it is rather tall order for stacks to run on
>>> the web in the way you are describing.
>>>
>>> If they can do it, yes things would become quite magical in that world.
>>> I think the hard truth is that it is probably too difficult a task to
>>> accomplish in the near future.