[thelist] Re: WWW and expectations

GregHolmes at aol.com GregHolmes at aol.com
Wed Mar 27 04:45:01 CST 2002


jdowdell at macromedia.com (John Dowdell) wrote:

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

Everything snipped, far as I can tell ... did you quote me at all? Thanks
to Daniel by the way for forwarding my mis-addressed email.  Subject
of this one cleaned up; we might just want to discuss this, anyhow.

>Marked-up text, along with basic interactivity, remains a viable
>file-format.

Of course.

>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.

Hmmm ... there are ways to "push" neat functionality in HTML/CSS/JS so that
client programs that don't support it won't fall over ... the way you say
it makes it sound like something else is needed ... whatever could it be ;)?
SVG? SMIL? Hmm ... could it be SWF ... I just don't know ...  ;)

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

Which is what I was saying to the gentleman complaining about the "mish-mash"
on the client program side ... the real environment of the WWW was always
intended to be a "mish-mash" of different clients, rendering the hypertext.

>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.

I don't doubt many technical issues would be easier, if you could mandate
the world's client programs.  By promoting the "do your whole site in Flash"
idea, Macromedia is proposing changing the lowest common client denominator
from the ability to do http and tag parsing (and some sort of rendering) to
the ability to render Flash files, either with a plugin, if MM happens to
make one for your platform and browser, or I guess with your own
implementation
of a binary file spec (I have no idea how difficult or easy this would be ...
if it were easy you'd think it would be done more and there be lots of Flash
renderers).

That's, well, a strategy.  We'll see.

Greg Holmes
gregholmes at aol.com




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