[Foundation-l] The problem with Flash

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 20, 2008 3:39 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Well given that as, from your point of view, this issue raises its ugly head
> yet again, it cannot be said that the community has reached consensus on
> this issue. There are people that do not share your opinion and are not
> afraid to say so. There are good arguments against the use of apparently not
> everybody bought into your ideas or weighs them and comes to a different
> conclusion.

Certainly, I'm not saying that it's unanimous.  But advocating we
should roll flash on the sites is something that I've pretty much only
seen Erik do here.

There are interesting issues and options to discuss here, and I've
been calling for that. I'm glad both Brion and Robert Rhode have
contributed some useful discussion.

(And on your part, I agree with the general position of moderation
that you've held in your posts on this matter)

> There is one thing you should consider, MediaWiki is not only used for
> educational purposes by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Indeed, which is why there are hundreds of MediaWiki extensions
included in the repository which Wikimedia does not use.  For example,
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Flash

> There is a lot of great
> educational material available in Flash. This is a really strong argument
> when you use MediaWiki in an educational setting.

*There is*, but every single piece of it could have existed in Java
instead, and the majority of what I've seen (almost anything that
doesn't have synced audio, or video) of it could have been created
using JS+DHTML+SVG and work in today's browsers without any plugins.

Most educational resources do not have the goals of freedom that
Wikimedia has, so they will take the path of least resistance on these
things. Our path is a little different, if it wasn't then we'd have no
reason to exist.

And of course, there are issues of accessibility to the disabled,
translatability to other human languages, compatibility with diverse
and low powered computer systems, transferability into other
non-computer mediums, ease or freedom of authorship and modification,
survivability/archiveability (can people read it in 100 years?).
Flash applets, and most other dynamic web toys/tools fail in all these
areas, to a greater or lesser extent, which may influence our adoption
of them more than it might influence some other educational groups.

The world doesn't end if we don't vacuum up all the internet's
educational materials overnight. ;) We can, and do, direct people to
other useful resources while we build, convert, and promote our
enormous collection of entirely free knowledge.

In terms of not being an island recognizing that we don't need to
subsume the whole world should be the first step.