Re: [Fsfe-uk] Free Flash-equivalents

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2006-10-09 at 14:28 +0000, Dave Page wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 02:41:35PM +0100, Jon Grant wrote:
> > It's a shame the US's FSF are promoting the "Flash" format via their
> > plugin development as a long term solution. (Seems to contradict their
> > positive anti-MS-Word stance?? I don't see them advocating us all use
> > AbiWord for its great support for MS-Word)

Well; Flash isn't quite in the MS Word category of "having to reverse
engineer the whole thing" - it's a pretty well documented file format.
It's also the easiest thing on the web to "program" for wide
compatibility if you care about how something looks - it's the PDF of
web pages, and more than 98% or something of the viewing populace have
it.

> > In my view we should focus on replacing their binary file-format which
> > is handled by a proprietary browser plugin with open technologies
> > browsers can support natively.  Then we can select text and bookmark
> > things which are presently hidden in "Flash" files.
> 
> I was discussing this on IRC last night. I seem to remember reading
> about the possibility of bundling JavaScript and SVG etc. to create
> an open, Flash-equivalent platform for animation and media. Did anything
> practical ever arise from this?

The browser + SVG + JS thing is really appealing - the point Jon
mentioned about it actually being a natural part of the web page in
particular is a good one; a plugin can never achieve that level of
integration.

It hasn't really happened for a number of reasons: the standards are all
somewhat new (particularly the object model that an SVG renderer
presents to the Javascript software which tweaks the running animation),
and it's also pretty horribly complex to do.

The main issue though, and one which the FSF have to some extent
ignored, is that there are virtually _no_ Flash animation tools that are
even vaguely free software. The nearest things are those things which do
screen capture (Istanbul? I don't know if that does Flash, but there is
one that does...), and OpenOffice.org, which can output presentations as
Flash (er.. to a limited extent ;).

Personally, the players I could somewhat care less about - I don't find
them insideously non-free, and on my scale of bad things they rate
'meh...'. The content creation tools are the real issue: and given that
the Gimp hasn't totally blown Photoshop out of the water yet, the
likelihood of Flash Studio / Freehand / Illustrator etc. being put out
of business is somewhere between zip and zero. And without the tools, we
don't really have much of a say in the format.

Cheers,

Alex.