Karl wrote:
IN a textbook I could see a place for some small flash animations, for example to represent some organic reactions. I poked around the site but found nothing definitive, except a lack of mention of flash usage. Could using flash animations in some contexts be a viable option?
Heavens no! Macromedia Flash is a proprietary software program that users would have to install separately from their browser. In many cases this is difficult or impossible (thinking of Linux and other non-MS/non-Apple OSes). Animated GIFs are much better because they work in nearly every browser without requiring the user to install a plug-in. But all GIFs have possible patent issues and are therefore not a great option either. Hopefully MNG (the animated version of the open source PNG image format) will be supported by IE soon (users of IE need to install a plug-in to see these last time I checked). Heck I say we should use MNG for the textbooks since by the time any one textbook gets any type of attention IE will probably be able to display MNG animations out of the box.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Heavens no! Macromedia Flash is a proprietary software program that users would have to install separately from their browser.
[snip]
Animated GIFs are much better
[snip]
Hopefully MNG (the animated version of the open source PNG image format) will be supported by IE soon (users of IE need to install a plug-in to see these last time I checked).
MNG support has been removed from new builds of Mozilla due to maintainer issues; many Mozilla users will also need a plug-in shortly.
Both MNG and GIF are very limited, though. They're bitmap formats (don't scale, and filesizes can be prohibitive for a large, attractive image on dial-up connections), and allow little-to-no interactivity.
As far as Flash; theoretically the _format_ spec is open, and at one point I regularly used a free software Flash plugin for Netscape on Linux. I don't know if it's still maintained, since Macromedia started putting out a binary version of their plugin for (some) Linux/Unix versions a couple years ago and likely squashed development momentum.
SVG with JavaScript would be open and allow for great possibilities, but decent SVG support is much harder to find than Flash, and JavaScript leaves open even more exciting security bugs. (As may Flash...)
Most significantly, though, no animation format is going to be fully accessible to vision-impaired readers or conversion to the printed page. This means that any animation we might have needs to have the same information presented in some alternate, text/print-friendly way.
Which makes the issue somewhat moot. Those who have the appropriate support in their browsers can make use of pretty animations; those who don't can make use of other formats. But it' a matter of authorial discipline to make sure that all information is available, accessible, and gracefully degrades where support is not available. (Better to think of it as gracefully _improving_ where extra support is available: the raw text should be the basis, and anything more is frosting on the cake.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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