flash vs html part 756 (was 2 cents)

hi again,

  Thanks for taking the time to reply.  Being a Coldfusion person I get a 
lot of pro-Macromedia rhetoric thrown at me so it was good to hear the other 
side of the story again.  I'm very sympathetic to almost all of what you 
said (I think you're 99% wrong about MX 2004 Pro being completelty timeline 
based, you can do everything you can do in HTML/JS without it, and as you 
admit once it's optional it's pretty nice to have around)

  The reason why such thoughts preoccupy me is that a little while ago I was 
going to create a few Coldfusion custom tags to wrap around QForms and 
probably bits from various DHTML apis (eg. 1k DHTML, Sarissa, netWindows), 
this was in response to an existing tag-based api (Fusionscript) moving from 
open-source to commercial.  But a few things made me go cold on the idea 
(eg. Safari being based on Konqueror and not Mozilla, wondeing if 
significant amounts of new Coldfusion apps were actually being developed in 
HTML etc.).

  Currently I'm involved in a multimedia community project, and I really 
wanted to try and do the project in DHTML.  But it just became too much 
hassle (client wants streaming audio, video effects, watermarking and so 
on).  I really hope that Devel is successful because as Macromedia bloggers 
are oh so fond of pointing out, truly cross-browser DHTML websites are often 
promised but rarely achieved.

It would sadden me to pay $699 for Flash MX 2004 Pro (they need a shorter 
name!), but I have CFStudio so I can sneak on the upgrade path and pick up 
Studio MX 2004 for a few hundered bucks ($999 normally).  The new 
Dreamweaver looks quite nice (fully CSS-based, full compatibility testing), 
and Fireworks sure will be nice to have around.  I *do* feel very much like 
I'm signing a pact with the devil, but I suspect I won't be the only one 
snuggling up to Macromedia's comfy bosom.  They have their flaws but they 
are a very well organised and focused company and I think they will become 
major players in Internet 2.0 .  I would not be shocked if they were bigger 
than Microsoft in 10 years, though that's not a prediction of course.

As I say, thank you very much for your replies and I look forward to 
exploiting your good work in the future.  HTML/JS needs an army.

Cheers,

Alan Hill

PS.  On a "Signals and Slots" tip, are you aware of the new CF (Java and PHP 
to come) MVC framework Mach-II ( http://www.mach-ii.com ), it's based on 
Implicit Invocation and will probably become the new "Fusebox" (cue "what?" 
from most of you, us CF-ers do have our bubble).

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