Re: 2 cents on the context menu

alan hill wrote:
> Speaking of Flash, is there any particular reason people have for not 
> wanting to use it?  I used to be quite anti-flash and am still 
> flash-sceptic, but I think MX 2004 kind of represents a tipping point 
> for me where the ease of development it provides begins to seriously 
> outweigh any concerns I have about it.
> 
> I suppose what I am asking is: what is the fundamental motivation behind 
> the development of netWindows?

The whole issue of the plugin is the clincher. Is is a standard? No. Can 
you gaurentee that it's present in a given browser? No. Do you have any 
recourse if Macromedia changes somthing in a new version of the plugin 
that then causes your application not to work? No. Heck, do they have a 
version built for OpenVMS on Alpha? I'd bet against it.

It's much easier to just stick with browsers that implement enough of 
the CSS/CSS2 standard to get you by. I know that I can run on any 
platform so long as it has the latest version of the users choice of 
browser installed on it. If they're going to try doing it with Lynx, 
I'll tell them where to go ;)

Can my app run on *BSD on some strange architecture? Yep. I don't need 
to worry that browsers are going to start purposly diverging from the 
standard or stop implementing it.

The whole point of a standard is so you don't have to worry about stuff 
changing under you. Yes you can do Cool Stuff(tm) with Flash. Would I 
bet the farm on it? No.

<rant>
Heck, it's bad enough with the Sun Community Process. Look at the crap 
the *BSD's have to go through to ship a stinking binary of the vm with 
each release. FreeBSD only managed it after some lawer wrangling with 
Sun, and OpenBSD doesn't currently have 'permission.' And they call Java 
an open development platform? Hah!
</rant>

Flash is completely propriatary. I'd use it on snazz up a website, but 
not to develop a mission critical app with.

--Michael


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