Cc-uk mailing list

["J. Grant" <jg AT jguk.org>]

Hi Rob,

[...]
> The animations are incredibly effective for communicating the basic  
> ideas to audiences, though (I saw this effect at Liquid Culture, it  was 
> striking). I agree that Free Culture must not be thwarted by non- Free 
> formats, but there are no practical alternatives to Flash at  this time, 
> and the FSF are working on a Free Flash. Hopefully this is  a historical 
> moment rather than a historical error...

Just a small point:

These problems are repercussions from the core. When you have founding
members of CC advocating proprietary software (be it Apple Mac, Adobe
Illustrator or other packages) in articles and on websites it causes
other people to repeat the mistakes of those at the core of a project.

In my view there are several practical alternatives to Flash at this
time, Flash functionality is a sub-set of open equivalents supported by
many software vendors:

1) SVG, JavaScript, XHTML, combined they surpass Flash.

2) Theora + Vorbis surpass Flash Video embedding

The former has been around for years, the latter is more recent.

There are plenty of SVG demos, below I list a few I found in about 3
mins of searching on Google, I discussed these with Mike L as well:

Space demo with audio
http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/audio.html

Analogue clock animation:
http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/clock.html

Interactive map:
http://www.adobe.com/svg/demos/moscowmap/main.html

Zoomable map:
http://www.dbxgeomatics.com/svgmapmaker/samples/hurricane_simulation.htm

Do you think CC might migrate to SVG/JavaScript/XHTML ? I do wonder why
they are so keen to support Macromedia Flash as default. (There is
always going to be a need for secondary versions of productions which
can be in proprietary formats to attract new people. I do not argue
against secondary choices, only what should be presented as default.)

If some one finds something that Macromedia's Flash has, that there is
no open equivalent for, I suggest that person donate what they would have
thrown away towards an open equivalent (take for example the price of
£448.99 for Macromedia Flash MX). Although, when CC staff are supporting
the problem is it any wonder the problem does not depart?

IMHO GPLFlash is a bad idea, as Macromedia/Adobe control the proprietary
format, so any shifts there will leave GPLFlash chasing the revised
standards in the same way that Samba gets stuck repeating MS design
faults in their compatible network protocol implementation.

FSF should spend their efforts supporting the work of W3C and on making
showcases to demonstrate the applicability of functionality for which
Flash contains a sub-set of. The only case when a proprietary format
should be supported is when it is part of a wider application  (e.g.
OpenOffice.org) which offers a complete migration strategy to something
better.

Anyway, enough of my views, I'd be interested to here what others think,
and if we could assist CC migrate forward from Flash to something better
in each case of its use.

Kind regards
JG
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