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Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge)
NewsForge
follows the progress of Gnash, an open-source player for Adobe
Shockwave/Flash files.
"Gnash currently works as a standalone application, implementing almost all of Flash 7. The project is developing a test suite to ascertain what remains to be done, and Savoye hopes the suite will prove valuable to other free Flash implementations as well.
Adapting the standalone player into a Mozilla/Firefox plugin is more challenging, Savoye says. Although detailed resources are available for developers creating browser extensions, Savoye reports that there is little documentation for plugin creators."
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open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 6:24 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] while the era of the flash intro page is over (remember when many corps had those?...pointless animated text like WE DELIVER RESULTS), flash still rears its ugly head in various contexts. modern dhtml stacks are competent enough that this usually is not necessary. it will be interesting to see if this presents any type of threat to adobe, who are probably wondering what the hell they are going to do with flash anyway.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 9:06 UTC (Fri) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] Not true if you require a guaranteed typeface, then you've either got Flash (possibly using something like sIFR) or giftext. Until the mythical day of font embedding comes we'll always suffer under this.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 12:30 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] Or until the mythical day when "designers" stop trying to force their ugly, usually-too-small fonts down our throats.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 15:26 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] What on earth could make you require a guaranteed typeface? It's exactlythat sort of thing that forces me to run privoxy, so I can filter out developer's idiotic ideas of what works, and replace it with something that actually works /here/! Of course, paralleling that is site developers that override browser default colors for no reason at all, other than that they prefer (say) dark text on a white background, when I have exactly the opposite preference. What's worst is when they simply /assume/ one's background is white, and thus specify black or dark text, without specifying a contrasting background to make it visible, or do the reverse, /assume/ one's text is black, and set background to something very light, without specifically setting text/foreground to something contrasting. I actually have quite a detailed privoxy filter for this. It's normally available at my web page, but that's currently over-bandwidth as I posted some KDE 3.5 with composite screenshots which ate up lots of bandwidth, so it's possible you'll need to save the link to use later (tho it seems to still be coming up here ATM). Anyway, for those interested: http://members.cox.net/pu61ic.1inux.dunc4n/ Duncan
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 19:06 UTC (Fri) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] As said downthread it's called branding, just because you don't think consistency is worth it (I could make some kind of cheap crack about KDE users here but will resist the temptation) doesn't mean that nobody else does.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 21:40 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] You know there are people with eyes disability that cannot read black text on white background only white text on black background.
There are lots of other circumstances when desobeying the users mean they will not able to read your message.
Consistency should be with users wishes, not brand wishes.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 12, 2006 23:14 UTC (Sun) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] There are many ways to respond to this but: http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/ is a start. Yes, accessibility is very important but slagging off a technology and player that is vital for many Users to be able to access loads of content that's already out there seems a little odd too.
What about SVG? Posted Feb 10, 2006 15:33 UTC (Fri) by edmundo (guest, #616) [Link] SVG lets you include your own font, and I've seen some rather nice interactive applications using SVG. However, I don't know very much about SVG or Flash. What does Flash give you that SVG doesn't?
What about SVG? Posted Feb 10, 2006 16:04 UTC (Fri) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link] Tools & Workflow Integrationhttp://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/flashpro/
What about SVG? Posted Feb 10, 2006 19:08 UTC (Fri) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] It's a good call, when SVG gets some really good penetration (ie more than just Firefox 1.5) which shouldn't be that far off hopefully, then you'll be able to use it for just this case, until then...
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 16:34 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] > Not true if you require a guaranteed typeface
the only reason i can think of doing this is for foreign glyphset support which flash doesn't buy you either. otherwise this is just bad design.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 19:04 UTC (Fri) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] No, it's called branding and is actually quite important if you're trying to create a consistent experience across loads of channels and actually want to use a nice typeface, rather than something Microsoft thought you should have.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 11, 2006 1:23 UTC (Sat) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link] "No, it's called branding and is actually quite important if you're trying to create a consistent experience across loads of channels and actually want to use a nice typeface, rather than something Microsoft thought you should have."
Jeez, that sounds like it was lifted from an MS PR brochure!
No, it's called conceit. You consider any and all needs or preferences of your readers to be of no importance whatsoever; your opinion of what is a "nice typeface" is of paramount importance, to you. This tells me that you are not interested in presenting information to your readers, only a carefully crafted appearance.
A logo or trademark needs to be consistent in appearance. A typeface or font is for presenting textual information. That text is wasted if the visitor cannot read it. If you prevent your visitors from adjusting that font so that they can read it, your obsession with the appearance on your machine renders your efforts a waste.
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 12, 2006 23:09 UTC (Sun) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/ and http://www.macromedia.com/resources/accessibility/flash8/
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 12, 2006 23:19 UTC (Sun) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link] Nice rhetoric. MS == Evil, PR == Evil point underminded! I doubt you would be accepting of poorly designed code as you are of poor visual design. As for the rest, yes, the user should always be paramount and I think (as expressed elsewhere in the thread) that SVG will be the future technology to do it. But there's a lot of flash stuff already out there and until SVG is ready and widely deployed, not having a Free player is actually removing the choice to access Flash content from the users whose needs you claim to be paramount. Relax, if people want to work on a project then it's not actively hurting anyone else is it? Surely that's the joy of free software!
open or not, flash still crapifies the web Posted Feb 10, 2006 20:47 UTC (Fri) by hchristeller (guest, #4246) [Link] The only required typeface is the one that I choose to view a site with. When branding becomes more important than keeping the customer happy, that's a sure sign of a company that I don't want to do business with.
There's a difference between Posted Feb 14, 2006 0:08 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] "I should be able to override a site designer's choices if I feel the need" and "we should make sure that site design is impossible, because branding is bad".
The latter is what you seem to be saying, and I hope I clarified the thoughts enough there to make obvious what my opinion on the issue is.
No one *said* you shouldn't be able to change fonts if you want to.
Yes, there are bad ways to use Flash.
But cars can be used to run people over, too. Should we outlaw cars?
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 10, 2006 10:57 UTC (Fri) by Zarathustra (guest, #26443) [Link] What a waste of effort, why not just let Flash die? I have not installed a flash player for years, and without it web browsing is much less painful. Disabling JavaScript also helps a lot.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 10, 2006 11:08 UTC (Fri) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035) [Link] What is good for you might not be good for others.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 10, 2006 13:41 UTC (Fri) by fjf33 (subscriber, #5768) [Link] I was in your camp until my 2 year old discovered the Disney Channel Online and other such web sites. They make HEAVY use of Flash and the likes for interactive games and other things. So yeah what works for some doesn't for others.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 12, 2006 2:39 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] "let flash die"
?
It seems to me that it's used more now then any other time in the past... I know that I run into websites all the time that use flash I cannot use because there is no closed source software support for my platform.
People use it for highly interactive applications, games, movies, and all sorts of other stuff like that.
I run into problems also with embedded video and audio applications. Lack of plugin support and all that. I've tried mozilla plugger thing, totem, and vlc plugins for Mozilla.. This works sometimes, usually doesn't.
If they did it in flash and I had flash support then it would work everytime.
It's just one of those things to make life on a Linux desktop more pleasent without having to deal with propriatory software.
Needed to view many sites' contents (especially kids' sites) Posted Feb 16, 2006 4:12 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] You need a flash reader, for the same reason you need a .doc reader... because there's a lot of content that is ONLY available in this format. It's used for many interactive sites where graphics and sound are used, lots of little videogames, etc. It's often used for the same tasks as Java applets were intended for.Many kids' sites, in particular, REQUIRE this. Neopets is one of the most popular sites on the web, and it requires Flash. Disnet, ditto. And you WANT the next generation to be using open source software, don't you? I agree that if your goal is "force the user to use my typeface even if it's stupid", that's a TERRIBLE reason to use Flash. But that's all the more reason that there is a NEED for an open source Flash player... so that users can once again be in control of their machines.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 10, 2006 18:20 UTC (Fri) by jamienk (guest, #1144) [Link] Gnash bears the distinction of being one of the FSF's high priority projects ... I'm not really sure I understand why FSF puts so much emphasis on this... As Zack argued, it might be a better idea to try and compete with Flash directly by figuring out WHY people use Flash, and coming up with a product that does that better and easier. Perhaps more energy should be spent (I know I know -- "WHOSE energy?") on developing SVG-animation-creation tools. These tools should try to emphasize new ways of exploiting the XML part of SVG, and finding the ways that this format is superior to Flash (it can better integrate and interact with web pages; it can be used with common methods like AJAX for server-driven events; there are several groups of people already working on various kinds of implementations so momentum could be built...). SVG isn't nearly as available as Flash, but it has potential. By the time a really good Free creation tool could be developed, it might be much more popular and robust in Firefox and Konq/Safari and Opera at least. I'm not saying that people shouldn't work on GNASH or on anything else that interests them. I'm just arguing for a change in priorities for the FSF in this case. A Free replacement for a Flash player should be that developers move away from using Flash, browsers and distributors move away from supporting it, and companies move away from demanding it. Then no one will want it.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 10, 2006 19:36 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] Think about the PNG problem. GIF had patent problems, so some developers made the PNG graphics format which was superior in many ways (although animation support wasn't finished). The PNG software developers announced PNG, and no websites switched because the users' browsers didn't support PNG. So they went to the browser-makers and asked them to support PNG and they were told that it was a low priority project since no websites currently used PNG. That was the late-90s. Animation support never got finished, probably due to lack of interest. PNG is supported by Firefox, but not properly Internet Explorer.
FSF are trying to offer freedom that people can conveniently transition to. Unfortunately, today that means writing a free software Flash player.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 10, 2006 21:17 UTC (Fri) by jamienk (guest, #1144) [Link] You make some good points. But I still feel that FSF should encourage making a FLASH (the program) replacement, not just a Free Flash viewer. Flash (the program) has so many annoying things about it -- first and foremost that it doesn't integrate well with the rest of my web development process. SVG has so much potential here. I'm convinced that, unlike PNG, people will create SVG animations if there is a great authoring tool -- and since the spec is so open and web-oriented, other tools are already available.
A big part of what's wrong with Flash from a user's perpective is that the proprietariness of the format makes it work so poorly with the rest of the web. I suppose that that issue goes more to the practical side of Free software than to the moral side, but it is why SWF is different from GIF. GIF was screwed up by patents more than anything else. Flash is a bloated unstable plugin that doesn't even work on some platforms. Flash should be replaced because it sucks, not just because it's evil. Sometimes it might be easier to defeat evil when it sucks really badly.
PNG was basically the same as GIF, but unencumbered. Its best new feature of alpha transparency couldn't be taken advantage of to a great extent until style sheets became better supported and understood. Now-a-days, many web developers (even those oblivious to issues of Freedom) go out of their way to use PNG in websites; a whole cottage industry has sprung up to make IE properly handle the format through various hacks.
http://www.google.com/search?q=png+transparency+ie
In fact, PNG seems to be on more and more web developers' minds as they try to do cool stuff with the newer technologies... This, no doubt, has put pressure on MS to better support it...
Sorry for the long-wind!
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 13, 2006 1:09 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] PNG is superior to GIF in many ways..
More then 256 colors, better lossless compression, support of a alpha layer, so on and so forth.
Now flash on the other hand...
Sure it sucks. But Unix sucks and if it was up to RMS and friends they probably would of built something like a Lisp machine rather then a Unix clone except that they knew that it being Unix-like made it compatable with a wide veriaty of already existing software and lots of people were already familar with it.
And I don't know how superior SVG animations would be to Flash. Sure SVG is more open, and that is wonderfull, but with it's XML format and such everything that I've seen so far that uses SVG has added lots of overhead.
I think that it's likely that in order for SVG to do things similar to Flash it would end up nearly as bloated and slow as flash is.
But I don't know that for a fact. In fact I would much prefer SVG, but I still have my reservations.
And then there is the problem of Microsoft.
Microsoft is barely able to deal with CSS standards accepted years ago by everybody else. They still haven't figured out how to make their own ActiveX crap work worth a damn in a secure manner... and since their browsers dominate the market...
And doesn't MS have competing technologies such as Avalon and some "flash killer" of their own?
How long do you suppose it's going to be for Microsoft to support SVG animations in their browser? Especially when SVG == Free software folks and doesn't contribute in any way to their bottom line and they have other competiting things that would help them lock customers in furthur?
Flash works right here, right now, and SVG doesn't. That's all there is to that.
Hell MS still doesn't support PNG worth a damn either.. even though pretty much every other company in existance does since.
Maybe look at PNG vs TIFF rather then PNG vs GIF when thinking about Flash versus SVG.
PNG is superior in almost every conceivable way to TIFF... but you have people swearing up and down that Tiff is the 'standard' and that everybody uses 'tiff'..
Even though there are over 50 different incompatable versions of Tiff formats out there.. Adobe has it's own Tiff. There are lossless uncompressed tiffs, there are lossy compressed tiffs, there are lossless compressed tiffs (with very bad lzw compression), etc etc..
And PNG is better then almost all of them, yet you'll have people looking down their noses at it.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 13, 2006 3:49 UTC (Mon) by jamienk (guest, #1144) [Link] FSF has a lot of clout. If they get behind a project, they advocate for it, they get listened to by smart people, they build momentum. They can't snap their fingers and make something happen, but they can influence "the community's" priorities.
Should they focus of removing blockers for people who might otherwise switch from MS or Apple? That seems to be their motivation for supporting Gnash as a "high priority" project: MS or Apple users expect it, but they cannot find Free versions of it.
OTOH, FSF could also make it a high priority of their's to encourage new, competing technologies. The Web is a competing technology to AOL's old network, ssh is a competitor to MS Remote Desktop Connection, and BitTorrent is a competitor to who-knows-what, in ways that go beyond OOo vs MSOffice, GIMP vs Photoshop, etc. They set a new standard, create a new demand.
The choice isn't one that should be made one time, and applied to everything. But our question here is which path to choose with regards to Flash.
It seems like a good idea to try to clone applications and functionality and spend lots on getting interoperability when those things are truly indispensable to users, and when a better, simpler, easier, more powerful solution can't be thought of.
I question whether Flash is truly indispensable at this point. Many web developers embrace it, computer distributors make it ubiquitous, and you see it a lot. But it also annoys users, hobbles developers, and is usually used to be Flahsy, not to do something useful or important. It isn't just a bad implementation of a good idea -- it feels fundamentally bolted-on to the web. The proprietariness of it can be FELT: you can't right-click it, it won't intermingle with the rest of the page, the back button won't work, your mouse wheel won't work to scroll, you hear your plugin rev up your processor... And the development tools are completely separate from the rest of your web work: you can't use your Javascript to access it (at least not easily), you can't integrate it with HTML forms (without a kludge), you can't use css with it, you can't use your images with it unless you integrate them inside the "Flash" program... etc.
SVG other hand, has none of these drawbacks. It also has a lot of thought behind it, growing mementum, and potential as far as the eye can see.
Free Software Foundation launches Gnash (NewsForge) Posted Feb 17, 2006 20:55 UTC (Fri) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] drag beat me to this point, but GNU is built upon copying inferior but de-facto standard programs. Unix. C. The unix shell. Tar. Make. Roff. Awk. Sed. It has rarely succeeded by developing alternatives. Pushing a new standard to acceptance is hard--hard enough that even giant companies like Sun have a hard time doing it (see how long it took Java to catch on). The FSF does have clout, but not enough I think to replace Flash. As coriordan noted, we still haven't killed GIF, which should have been much easier than killing Flash!Moreover, remember GNU is not primarily a technology movement, it is a social movement. Making it possible for more people to live their lives with free software is a high priority, and if Flash is a blocker for people, it makes sense for the FSF to focus their efforts on it. As a confirmed Flash hater myself, I grudgingly welcome the FSF's effort. Just as I hate proprietary office formats but am thankful for OpenOffice (now that it is finally tolerable to use), because it helps me get along with the world without giving up my freedom. Furthermore, it integrates into my system much better than a proprietary program would; I expect that likewise Gnash will behave much better in the browser environment than the proprietary Flash plug-in. A great Gnash integration could make Firefox even more appealing and draw more people to free software.
gplflash2 is shutting down, joining gnash Posted Feb 10, 2006 19:57 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] The gplflash homepage says that they are shutting down their rewrite efforts to join Gnash. I think it's great news. More developers means better chances that Gnash will be actively developed, rather than stall like its predecessors.
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