[clipart]The one persistent mantra I hear from staunch Flash defenders, folks like John Dowdell, is that Flash gives you the benefit of one consistent runtime. The Flash platform probably renders more consistently across browsers than HTML+SVG+Canvas+CSS - since the plugin directly controls a box of pixels on the web page I should hope so! But is it equally consistent across operating systems? And has it always been that way?

Don't worry, Flash isn't dead yet, but it's clear that the tides are changing these days, with more devices entering the market that do not (and cannot) have Flash installed. Frankly SWF is no longer the reliable format it once was. Yes you can reach 90+% of the desktop browsers, but what about the millions of mobile web users?

So lots of people have had the same idea: Adobe needs to update its tools to output in Open Web formats. Simple, no? Instead of Save As SWF, Save as Web App, right?

"But wait!", I hear some Adobe lovers cry. Rendering across browsers isn't consistent! The DOM is a mess! There are tons of CSS layout bugs! SVG/Canvas support across browsers is uneven at best! There are many features that aren't even supported in some browsers yet!

Hogwash. OpenLaszlo foresaw this transition years ago. GWT does the same thing.

You Adobe folk are bright engineers. You just have to make it work. Exactly like you made it work, and continue to make it work, across Windows, OSX and Linux graphics systems. The rendering layer is at the browser now, not the operating system.

There are lots of JavaScript frameworks that help to smooth out the script and DOM bumps. There are tricks you can do until SVG/Canvas feature X is consistently supported. Someone already figured out how to render SWF files using SVG+JS, for goodness sake.

And guess what - two of the major browser engines are open source - which means if a particular feature is missing in those implementations you can put an engineer on it for two months so that in the next version of the browser, it will be there for you.

You just need to think ahead.

As I'm sure you are. 😉

§680 · February 9, 2010 · Adobe, Laszlo, Software, Technology, Web · Tags: , , · [Print]

Leave a Comment to “Don’t worry, Adobe will step it up”

  1. John Dowdell says:

    Hi Jeff, sorry if I don’t hone in on the main point here….

    “Adobe needs to update its tools to output in Open Web formats. Simple, no? Instead of Save As SWF, Save as Web App, right?”

    Creative Suite is already used every day for web formats. I’m not sure what you’re seeking. Maybe this is relevant…?
    http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/adobe_authoring_for_html5.html

    “And guess what – two of the major browser engines are open source – which means if a particular feature is missing in those implementations you can put an engineer on it for two months so that in the next version of the browser, it will be there for you.”

    I’m not sure how that would work… we could change our own versions of those two published-source browsers, but it has been hard to get such commits admitted for general distribution, much less into majority distribution. Flash improvements, on the other hand, are adopted by “all” consumers within a year, and all browsers are thereby improved. Seems a useful complement.

    jd/adobe

  2. Jeff says:

    Hi John,

    Creative Suite is already used every day for web formats. I’m not sure what you’re seeking.

    I thought I made that clear: Let me save my Flash project as a web app that uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SVG. There is a gaping hole right now for sophisticated tools that produce rich interactive experiences for the Open Web technologies. The Flash IDE is what everyone wants to use, yet SWF is not available everywhere.

    I’ll be even more explicit. I’m talking about the Flash IDE here: Vector graphics, rich text, filters/effects, animation, hooking up code snippets, audio/video, etc.

    You also mention on your blog post “would you do for a movie clip?”. But didn’t I answer that question ?

    As for the main point of my post, which you admit to side-stepping, the never-ending gospel according to JD is that Flash is a reliable runtime while the browsers are a grab bag of unreliable capabilities. My point is that Flash is only a reliable runtime because Macromedia/Adobe have made it so (by carefully engineering software that works reliably on the Windows, OSX and Linux platforms). Now it’s Adobe’s turn to do the same thing on the browsers.

  3. Jeff says:

    I’m not sure how that would work… we could change our own versions of those two published-source browsers, but it has been hard to get such commits admitted for general distribution, much less into majority distribution

    Really? I’ve found both the WebKit and Mozilla teams to be quite amenable to improvements and bug fixes. I would be extremely curious to look at the bugs that Adobe tried to submit. Do you have some links?

  4. John Dowdell says:

    Thanks, but I’m still not sure how to induce greater cohesion among the major browser vendors, beyond what they’ve done themselves. I’ll pass your post among my partners, maybe one of them sees a better path.

    jd/adobe