I go to that site with Firefox and it tells me my browser is not supported. Firefox.
This is precisely his point, web video used to be like this. "Firefox support is in the works". People are past the point where they need to have something "in the works" to do something as simple as showing their audience a video.
I am the biggest open web advocate you will find, but I don't see why its necessary to lie about the current state of affairs. HTML5 video is not ready for prime time. Will it be at some point? Of course. But pretending it is today is silly and distracts from fixing its obvious failings. The need to encode your video into multiple formats is a big deal, the fact IE doesn't support it at all is a big deal, the question of how to insert dynamic ads reliably into videos for people like Hulu is a big deal. Not to mention its still pretty darn buggy. The idea that Flash became useless yesterday is a joke.
I don't think anyone is claiming that "Flash became useless yesterday".
hyperbolist was just offering an example of good-looking video via HTML5 to counter the claim that a world without Flash is a world in the dark ages of video.
My point is that unless you are deliberately trying to put words in his mouth (or simply didn't read the article), that link proves the CTO's point, not counters it. Look at the exact quote from our CTO friend:
"...so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."
He's not saying the player won't look good or be sexy or whatever, he saying it will throw us back into the times when watching video depended on what OS/browser/codecs you had. This link demonstrates that exactly.
Instead of laughing at him and brushing of what he is saying by pointing to some demo that doesn't work in most people's browsers, we should take it as valid criticisms and demand the standards bodies get it together and fix these problems.
Many sites deliver video by H.264 in the absence of Flash. It is seamless to the user, and there are no blue legos. The fact that Flash is missing from iPhones and iPod Touches, and that people with those devices are using the web, produced this situation. The "Dark Age" is already here, and it's not a dark age.
The link I submitted is indeed both an example of the "Dark Age problem" of HTML5 (that Firefox refuses to support H.264); and that video can be delivered quite satisfactorily via HTML5, without Flash.
I believe we are confusing what we are discussing. It does no good to take someone's words out of context and display them in a political-style sound byte, as seems to be the case here. In every one of my posts I have always said that HTML 5 will be strictly better, but that Adobe's CTO was absolutely correct that currently (and unless the trajectory changes in the future too), we will be jettisoned backwards into a world where we have to create multiple versions of things.
We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing intelligently.
The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory. We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think "what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 . However, I can see that there exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to "HTML5").
Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works... everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved.
The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use it to fix it.
This isn't about just playing video. This is about integrating video into the web instead of leaving it partitioned in a plugin somewhere. None of my Firefox extensions can interact with Flash video (except AdBlock which just removes it from the page). On the other hand, you can use javascript and canvas to do really cool things with video in the browser.
You don't understand. Yesterday, the fact that Firefox didn't support the video was "something that will be fixed one day, who knows when, maybe before 2020". Today, it is a big bug which needs to be addressed ASAP.
People don't compare managing software projects to herding cats just to be cute. Getting everyone to pull in the same direction really is 90% of the job. You need to start a stampede.
(The classic way to get programmers stampeding toward an actual product? Threaten to ship the product. Then, carry out that threat.)
The position of the players has not changed. But the second derivative has changed, and the first derivative will follow...
I don't know why Adobe's clinging to Flash so tenaciously anyway. They can't make that much money from it and it always seemed a little tangential to their core competencies of making graphics/DTP software. It's not like they put a lot of effort into it or anything; it has sucked, badly, for years.
After looking briefly at their 2009Q4 conference call transcript, they reported "Platforms" (Flash) revenue at around $47 million and "Creative solutions" (photoshop, etc) around $430m out of ~ $750m total. I'm not sure if you can cleanly separate out how much Flash is worth to them, since I'm sure part of that Creative solutions revenue is for Flash authoring tools.
Agreed. No one pays for the flash player, so who cares what the player is. Just become the best at content creation. There will always be a huge market for creating all of what flash does today.
I'm all for the dark ages if it means I might finally get vertical synced video playback (which even Flash 10 still cannot do, so I get to enjoy obvious screen tearing in hulu, youtube and amazon videos).
The fact that Adobe continues to ignore details like vsync makes me wonder if they even know what a good video playback experience would look like.
To quote what Adobe exactly said: "Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."
Ofcourse saying "Back to the dark ages of video due to incompatibility issues" in headline doesn't generate clicks.
While Flash is pretty awful, I think it's plain the only reason Apple doesn't want it on their devices is because it allows for functionality that Apple don't want you to access without you paying them. http://listen.grooveshark.com/, for example, completely voids any reason to pay for music over iTunes. Not to mention the thousands of games and other content that offers an alternative on their proprietary store front hardware.
Yes, because there're aren't Last.fm and Pandora apps, not to mention thousands of games, for free in the app store. The app store that comes free on the hardware. And I totally bought every singe one of the 9,358 songs in my library from the iTunes store.
Say what you want about Apple's approval policies or how the iPad is going to kill babies because it's closed, but the lack of flash is clearly a performance/user experience decision over a political one.
And a lot of Flash games wouldn't be playable on the iPhone anyway, because they assume (1) a keyboard, (2) a mouse cursor, and/or (3) multiple mouse buttons -- none of which the iPhone has, or can easily emulate.
quote: But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.
I'm not so sure about things like vector graphics animations, but I'd be willing to bet that Flash has lost online video with HTML5. About time too. Flash is a plague of the modern browser and I will be happy when I'm rid of it (Click2Flash already does most of that). Google/Youtube HTML5 HD H.264 is amazing. What used to take up 95% of a core in Flash now takes 2%. Here's what I have to say about Flash: good riddance.
Is there an HTML5 alternative to vector graphics? Even if HTML5 take down flash video, will we all still have the flash plugin for games and other interactive uses?
29 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 70.4 ms ] threadThis is precisely his point, web video used to be like this. "Firefox support is in the works". People are past the point where they need to have something "in the works" to do something as simple as showing their audience a video.
I am the biggest open web advocate you will find, but I don't see why its necessary to lie about the current state of affairs. HTML5 video is not ready for prime time. Will it be at some point? Of course. But pretending it is today is silly and distracts from fixing its obvious failings. The need to encode your video into multiple formats is a big deal, the fact IE doesn't support it at all is a big deal, the question of how to insert dynamic ads reliably into videos for people like Hulu is a big deal. Not to mention its still pretty darn buggy. The idea that Flash became useless yesterday is a joke.
hyperbolist was just offering an example of good-looking video via HTML5 to counter the claim that a world without Flash is a world in the dark ages of video.
"...so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."
He's not saying the player won't look good or be sexy or whatever, he saying it will throw us back into the times when watching video depended on what OS/browser/codecs you had. This link demonstrates that exactly.
Instead of laughing at him and brushing of what he is saying by pointing to some demo that doesn't work in most people's browsers, we should take it as valid criticisms and demand the standards bodies get it together and fix these problems.
The link I submitted is indeed both an example of the "Dark Age problem" of HTML5 (that Firefox refuses to support H.264); and that video can be delivered quite satisfactorily via HTML5, without Flash.
We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing intelligently.
The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory. We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think "what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 . However, I can see that there exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to "HTML5").
Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works... everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved.
The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use it to fix it.
Examples:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/add-ambiance-to-your-videos...
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/connecting-html5-video/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/pop-art-video/
and the same with audio:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/exploring-music-audio/
You don't understand. Yesterday, the fact that Firefox didn't support the video was "something that will be fixed one day, who knows when, maybe before 2020". Today, it is a big bug which needs to be addressed ASAP.
People don't compare managing software projects to herding cats just to be cute. Getting everyone to pull in the same direction really is 90% of the job. You need to start a stampede.
(The classic way to get programmers stampeding toward an actual product? Threaten to ship the product. Then, carry out that threat.)
The position of the players has not changed. But the second derivative has changed, and the first derivative will follow...
Let it go, Adobe. All things must end.
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/q409Script...
The fact that Adobe continues to ignore details like vsync makes me wonder if they even know what a good video playback experience would look like.
Ofcourse saying "Back to the dark ages of video due to incompatibility issues" in headline doesn't generate clicks.
Say what you want about Apple's approval policies or how the iPad is going to kill babies because it's closed, but the lack of flash is clearly a performance/user experience decision over a political one.
quote: But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.
(or will we just write all that crazy stuff in the new javascript libraries: http://raphaeljs.com/scape/)