<nettime> flash! digest [elloi, recktenwald, barr, whid]

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Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>
     Re: <nettime> RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH (2 / 3)
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>
     Re: <nettime> RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (2 / 3)
Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu>
     FLASH v. HTML
"t.whid" <twhid@mteww.com>
     GENERATION SVG

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Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 21:01:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH (2 / 3)

>It don't think Flash is very beautiful and elegant in its code and
>internal design. HTML, as an SGML Document Type Definition, is beautiful
>and elegant enough internally so that almost anyone can write it
>_directly in code_, on any piece of software that is able to save ASCII
>files. - So HTML and other open, structured formats do not only provide
>the freedom of choosing software for its display, they also provide the
>freedom of choosing software for its creation (and even let it
>dynamically generate by programs/scripts - can you create Flash code by
>CGI?).

There is a very fundamental issue here - dependance on a human-readable format.

[ One may think that "human-readable" is a stretch for computer files, but
pervasiveness of plain text and tools to view and edit it make it a practical
reality. ASCII is going to be with us for a very long time. Even microsoft
didn't manage to kill ASCII files, and I often perform a 'strings' command on
ms documents to extract the content. ]

Money is made in computer world by inserting oneself between the author and the
public. If author's work is captured and packaged via proprietary means, then
the owner of the means becomes the real owner of the work. There are very few
people creating original content these days. But there are tens if not hundreds
of thousands who parasite on the transfer of this content to the public. Just
in the audio/video arena in the last few years we have seen many tens of
proprietary format propositions, with many millions invested in them
(fortunately almost all failed.) 

The goal should be to make most of the content "human-readable" by making tools
unencumbered by ownership and patents.

Witness the success of:

- ASCII

- gcc, GNU C compiler, which is singularly resposible for opening the software
in general. It practically standardised the object file format. It's hard
explain how bad it can be to those that don't remember COBOL.

- postscript and later PDF, both open for all practical purposes

- TIFF, JPEG, MP3 and even GIF (patented by Unisys)

- SGML/HTML

With today's cost and size of transistors there are no technical reasons why
any file format should not be human-readable.

As for flash (which for me and many others presents just a kitschy nuisance),
if it becomes a real success an open substitute will be developed. This was
always case in the past. Absence of such is an indication that flash is still a
marginal product - marketing VPs are a very small percentage of internet
population.

[One piece of software that I'd like to see - a flash plugin that extracts URLs
from the flash compiled code and presents it as plain html, in those cases when
braindead web designers fail to provide a non-flash path to the data. I have a
small script that does it on a unix box.]



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Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 01:52:56 +0200 (CEST)
From: Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>
Subject: Re: <nettime> RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH  (2 / 3)

Dear Florian,

> mp3-/MPEG4-style license fees from content creators any time they want.

Well Flash is Flash is Flash is Flash and you will not be able to see Doom
or Tilmann mods (article in the Zeit) in 2100 if you dont have a computer
museum, but, old topic, do you know a single case where such "use
fees" have been paid ?

H.

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Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 17:43:01 -0400
From: Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu>
Subject: FLASH v. HTML

Some thoughts--

At 2:20 PM +0200 4/19/02, Florian Cramer wrote:
>While of course it is doubtful whether HTML will still be used and HTML
>browsers will still widely exist in the year 2100, anybody will be able
>to look up the W2C HTML specification in a library and write a program
>that displays ancient 20/21st century web pages. The same is impossible
>for Flash.

Proprietary systems haven't stopped people from creating emulators 
that allow "out-of-print" video gaming consoles to be re-experienced. 
Why would it stop emulator authors a hundred years from now?

At 2:20 PM +0200 4/19/02, Florian Cramer wrote:
>But the multimegabyte download of the Flash plugin + signing of the
>proprietary "End User License Agreement" (EULA) hasn't ruled it out for
>you?

The largest of the Flash downloads is version six, which is 660K, not 
multimegabytes.

At 2:20 PM +0200 4/19/02, Florian Cramer wrote:
>So your
>choice would be to, for example, dial into the Internet with AOL or MSN
>or ditch .mp3 in favor of .wma with "Digital Rights Management" just
>because the software was pre-installed on your computer?

You'd have to ditch mp3 too--since Microsoft is, to use your terms, 
just giving it away like a heroin pusher.  It's really hard to use NO 
properietary systems.

Also, if you are forced to optimized your HTML for Macs and WIndows 
versions of IE and netscape, and Palms, and so on, aren't you 
controlled by MORE proprietary systems than the Flasher designer who 
is enslaved by Macromedia and achieve cross-platform stability?

-- 
Brandon Barr
University of Rochester
http://brandonbarr.com

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Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 11:12:46 -0400
From: "t.whid" <twhid@mteww.com>
Subject: GENERATION SVG

>>  http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/1197
>
>This guy you link to is living in 1997, or in some kind of alternate
>dream world where the web is a magical land of total freedom from
>corporate control. Using SVG is like speaking Esperanto to spite the
>hegemony of the nation-state system - a noble but totally futile
>gesture, and a waste of time for everyone from big businesses to
>individual artists. This might change, of course, but as of now I don't
>know anyone at all, or any web site at all, that works in SVG. I would
>have tried, but the 1-megabyte plug in download pretty much ruled it out
>for me.

SVG is great but doomed. the plug-in for Mac osX is 4MB!!! compared 
to 600-800KB for the newest flash plug-in.

plus, face it, what large corporation wants to put their trademarks 
all over the web in such a way as everyone can simply lift them at 
any resolution they please? and, sorry to say, without the infusion 
of money and energy that corp. backing will bring, SVG will never 
reach critical mass.

i long for SVG, i truly do, and for an art project it would be 
worthwhile to use. but only other designers and artists would ever 
see it, because they're the only ones who have the plug-in (which is 
installed when one installs illustrator or photoshop).

and another thing!
why doesn't msie support 24bit PNG (ya know, real transparency)? 
think of how much time we would all save. eeeerrrr!
-- 
<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

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