On 5/14/2010 2:22 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
I always perceived a lack of interest. Few people really want to work on it, it seems. I root for Gnash, but I go ahead and use Adobe's non-free player.As long as you use adobe's player, you're not really rooting for Gnash.
It comes down to options. There are none. Gnash is not a viable option. If it were, I would use it.
The former is becoming mooted by the advent of HTML5. The latter is boring, since there are 1000s of other ways to write programs that run in web browsers, e.g., Javascript.Actually, I'd be interested to know what are those other 999. AFAIK Javascript and Flash are the only games in town. And in some areas (e.g. modern furniture companies come to mind), Flash-based websites is the norm. So Flash is important.
Oh, if you give me a plugin, as Flash is, then I can use anything I please.
But in either case, for users who care about their Freedom, both Flash and Javascript are real threats, because even if you use a Free Software implementation of the language, the code run in each web-page will usually be 100% proprietary.
True. And even Javascript itself is subject to proprietary whims. After all, it depends on browser support. If a particular browser becomes dominant for a while, it could dictate (for a while) it own implementation be the "standard", as Microsoft managed to do with IE6.
What I meant was, it's pushed code. But it's any code the site owner desires, as long as the browser can interpret it.
Amazon, for example, depends heavily on Javascript, as does, of course Google. They, *do* desire a fixed standard, because they can run on anything then, from a PC to a Blackberry, as long as it has a browser that supports Javascript. Why use Flash when every browser already has what we need? And with HTML5, the limitations are reduced, and I'm not just talking about the video tag.
MAA