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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
In complete contra-distinction to Eriks post, this on the face of it appears to be a useful contribution to the discussion about file formats.
:)
If I understand correctly, you are saying that flash can benefit us not as something in which our content in the sense of the "original" document is kept, but as a form of conveying that "original" document to a prospective single time user. That is not conveyed to somebody who wants our content for mass reuse, but who wants just that one snippet of content, that one time.
Well, here's how I might summarize the issue: Flash is a _software platform_, not a _content format_.
Now, we don't tend to like big flashy take-over-the-whole-site Flash thingies. Who does? When Flash replaces a whole web page it tends to make things harder to use.
But for specific things that classic HTML is limited at (like, say, interactive vector graphics), it could be a useful *delivery tool* in our toolbox *alongside* the lovely HTML 5/W3C/"open web standards" tools we love, when they're not available.
Flash-as-a-video-player only supports patent-encumbered audio and video codecs. The issue there isn't really Flash, but the underlying media formats the Adobe Flash Player supports.
Flash-as-a-lightweight-client-platform has different characteristics:
* The de facto standard implementation has something like 90% market penetration, and is not open source.
(Same with Internet Explorer, which we support as a target for our HTML+JS+CSS output.)
* Open source implementations exist, but they are incomplete and rarely seen in the wild.
(Unlike plain HTML, it's not a de jure standard *or* a de facto standard in the world of FOSS operating systems. Thus it shouldn't be our sole or primary target since we care very much about supporting users in that world.)
* The file formats Flash uses to load its software are not open standards, but they _are_ now documented without NDA restrictions. Further, core development tools for the platform such as bytecode compilers are open source.
(MediaWiki's own wiki text format is also not an open standard, but what documentation exists is open, the tool is open source, and we deliver to open standards.)
The second part of your message, do I understand it correctly that you are suggesting that content we would already have in some form, could be conveyed to people who can not digest it in the format in which it is stored, by some <magic> fashion can be made available to them, by the expedience of using flash, when nothing else would serve?
*nod*
The example I used is the <canvas> element for scriptable in-browser graphics. This has become a part of next-generation HTML standards work thanks to de-facto adoption by the various major web browsers... except for Internet Explorer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element)
So this is a neat tool for more interactive web goodies which is part of the open standards movement; you can make something using <canvas> which will work on Firefox, Safari, and Opera. But today, you need something _else_ for Internet Explorer.
One way to do this is to make an emulation layer which provides the standard <canvas> programming interface. One such project uses Flash as a base, since it provides similar graphics capabilities and lets you provide a JavaScript interface:
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/flash-canvas/
There are also VML-based implementations for IE which don't require Flash. AFAIK they're all limited, and we don't do any <canvas> stuff today anyway. :) But it's something I wouldn't want to rule out at this stage.
Progressive enhancement for uploading tools is more likely to happen in the short to medium term.
(As an amusing side, note, somebody's been working on an Ogg Vorbis decoder for Flash, which compiles to ActionScript: http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/ No Theora video support yet. ;)
- -- brion