[thelist] [Fwd: WWW and expectations (was QT detection)]

[John Dowdell]

[forward snipped... title retained because there I don't reasonably see
possible followups to this op/ed piece]

Marked-up text, along with basic interactivity, remains a viable
file-format. Where people seem to get into trouble is where they seem to
assume that all implementations of these file-formats are equivalent, and
try to push them beyond their area of overlap.

(Check threads where people bash a browser... like complaining about the
weather. This is part of your real environment, deal with it.)

Progress is indeed being made. For instance, when HTML 2.0 was made an
actual IETF Standard, that file-format specification wasn't supported as
uniformly by the engines of the day as it is now. Matter of fact, we've got
a pretty good realworld convergence around the HTML 3.2 Recommendation by
this point. Newer browsers are much better aligned around the HTML 4.0x
Recommendations than they were a year ago, but it will still take awhile
for the various engines out there in the world to be updated.

One of the things folks at Macromedia are trying to do with this new Flash
Player is to hasten the realworld adoption rate for new levels of control
by designers and developers. By starting with the engine, rather than the
file-format spec, you can cut out that divergence between ideal capability
and real capability. Further, with the small engine size which fits into
various browsers, you can also speed the adoption rate of this new
rendering capability.

HTML, JS and all is great stuff, and won't go away. But when you start by
defining the file format and then test various engines against it, it takes
longer to do new things than if you start by just providing an ability.
Also, small unobtrusive downloads usually get adopted faster than large
downloads which visibly change the working environment.

jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA US
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