On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
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David Gerard wrote:
2008/10/3 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
The <canvas> element of HTML5, in Firefox. That's what all the cool browsers are doing these days.
Which was my example of a preferred target technology. :)
Right. I wouldn't be opposed to using flash to run a drop-in <canvas> emulator (providing the emulator flash file itself was free software) for features where the rest of the code is regular old JS which ran without flash on modern browsers.
The important distinction currently between a flash video player and a <canvas> emulator is that the canvas emulator would be an option open to everyone at no cost while a flash video player currently requires codecs that require licensing due to patents. (For the codecs fees must be paid for encoders, decoders, and for usage of the encoded files).
So even if the use of the canvas emulator misses an opportunity to encourage people to install a <canvas> supporting browser that does not costs anyone their freedom or leaving anyone feeling forced to spend money. Any website could throw up the same JS code that uses the native HTML or free softwareFlash Canvas and pay fees to no one and be at no risk of litigation.
Those sorts of usage usually don't create any additional accessibility problems, nor create any materil security problems.
So yea, I agree that there could be possibly reasonable uses of Flash, which was exactly why I singled out flash video in my initial post in this thread. Such uses, which run afoul of no patents nor involve any proprietary-only features wouldn't be prohibited by the proposed file format resolution (as members of the subset of flash files which are not proprietary nor require unavailable codec patents). Sadly, Video is not currently one of them but it's the use of Flash everyone but Brion thinks of. ;)
Though I do wonder how many of the other uses would ever happen and how many are just idle speculation: For example we've had a Java bulk uploader (commonist) for *years* which could be web-started with nearly zero effort (throw the jar onto upload, and the rest could be done from sitejs) and make bulk uploading much easier. ... Yet, it hasn't been done.