Infrequently Noted

It's pretty sad that the web/unix world (see "applets, Java") hasn't managed to deliver the sort of high-quality client-side experience that Flash has been providing for years now. I'm hoping that the open web is finally turning the corner and there will be a glut of video, 3D and audio options available natively in all of the major browsers. Or, at the very least, the coolest possible Fa^H^H social network app that has the courage to demand its young, hip, economically advantaged users employ a browser that can keep up.

Thanks for the kind words, Alex.

Gavin: it's true that browsers have lagged behind Flash in terms of, well, flash, for which Adobe should be thanking Microsoft quite heartily. Had the web's great friend in Redmond not pinned the web to the ground with their IE monopoly and then walked away for the better part of a decade, we might well have seen some graphical advances that didn't come with questionable licensing terms and opaque formats. You can do some pretty amazing things these days with SVG, DHTML, and toolkits like Dojo, but there's a long legacy of "ordered lists and GIFs" to overcome. We'll get there, and sooner than you might think. :)

MIke:

Gavin has a pretty deep background in 2D and 3D software development and has contributed in places to the design of the Dojo 2D abstraction APIs. You fellas might want to exchange contact info = )

Regards

Hi, I left a comment over at Mike's, which hasn't made it out of the moderation queue yet. I copied it over into weblogs.macromedia.com/jd.

I don't think anyone at Adobe thanks Microsoft for the complexities it has introduced. But getting multiple implementations to really match up will always take longer than a single implementation. After awhile, though, new abilities always get commoditized (eg, text-refresh via Ajax).

That's why it's not one-or-the-other development approach, but both. Lots of people try things, then the good stuff gets standardized.

jd/adobe