[thelist] Illustrator 9 vs. Flash (is: open SWF)

John Dowdell jdowdell at macromedia.com
Tue Oct 10 16:28:19 CDT 2000


At 11:42 AM 10/9/0, Mike Migurski wrote:
> Anyone know the current state of the SWF format? I know that it
> was opened a while back, but I heard rumors that macromedia made
> it proprietary again.

The SWF3 file format was documented and published in April 1998.

The SWF4 file format was our Waterloo... there were various delays in
getting this published, ranging from outsourcing to formatting to legal
issues. It was an agonizing wait... January 2000 was the actual publishing
date.

The SWF5 file format is on a better track... the changes were finalized in
late August of this year, and the documentation is expected to be published
by December 2000. The same technical documentation group has been hired and
brought in-house, the formatting and legal issues were resolved on the last
cycle... this description of the new scripting abilities should be
finalized and published very soon.
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/open/licensing/fileformat/faq.html


Context: The SWF file format documentation describes how to write a file
that will play back in the Macromedia Flash Player. Old files will continue
to play in new versions. The interest in new file format documentation is
the set of new abilities available in each rev. The cat's out of the bag on
basic SWF... there are probably over fifty tools today which read, write,
and edit this deliverable file format, and they'll all play in the
distributed Player.

jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
Search technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/
Offlist email risks capture by the spam filters. I may not see your
email if it's not on the list. Private one-on-one email options are
available via Priority Access: http://www.macromedia.com/support/






More information about the thelist mailing list