[Foundation-l] Freedom, standards, and file formats

[Milos Rancic]

Brion, you are talking as a chief of technical staff of one small NGO.
Please, keep in mind that you are the main technical person of the
biggest achievement of humans. While it is inside of the reasonable
solutions, Wiki[mp]edia doesn't need to adopt anything which is
ethically not acceptable.

* Showing movies may be solved by VLC or whichever free software plugin.
* It seems that SVG is better format than SWF. However, it is not supported yet.

But, "interactive content" written in Flash is useful for video games
and a very small specter of other content. Interactive content will be
really useful when SVG would be adopted.

Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without
using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
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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
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