On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 3:22 PM, Tei oscar.vives@gmail.com wrote:
Anyway this is a discussion for mailto:wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org?subject='[OT] Is Flash Evil?'&body=yes
Often people choose binary protocols (like SWF) because it make easier to optimize the filesize. Anything that make lots of request to a server may have a horrible overheat. And you can save a SWF file, and play it offline.
Whether Flash is acceptable for Wikimedia uses is not off-topic. It's been discussed here and on Foundation-l in the past, and it's been made clear that it and other non-free formats will be avoided wherever practical for official uses. Of course, what users may choose to put up on the toolserver or other places is a different issue.
I don't know why you think JavaScript-based animation would cause larger filesize here. In principle all you'd need is a short procedural script that would replace the HTML of the page and let the browser re-render it. Unless you plan to squish it so that it fits in a reasonable-sized image, and is unreadable on large pages?
Of course, actually rendering the real page would have a very good use beyond being standards-compliant: it would serve as a quick way to jump through revisions looking for where a change was introduced or similar, rather than having to go back to the history page and click a link. You could even do prefetching to avoid synchronous page loads and thereby make it very fast, like paging through Gmail. It could be quite practical.