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Last week the first of the Macromedia MX tools arrived,
Macromedia Flash MX.
If you tried to access member areas of the site on
Friday you probably saw delays from the unprecedented
traffic jam. The download-and-buy versions alone
surpassed anything the site had ever seen. Also, for
the first time, the trial versions were available
simultaneously. There were new Players released to
the general public, too. Traffic should be more reasonable
now, and in the future we'll be moving the old Macromedia
personalization servers over to ColdFusion so it will
be handle even heavier loads better.
I noticed a couple of comments out there about "Macromedia
taking over the web", and I'm really not sure how
folks got there. It wasn't a widespread comment...
for every weblog like Simon
St Laurent there were more straightforward ones
like Richard
Koman and David
Burrows, for every pile-on like
Slashdot there was something more readable like
JavaLobby, but there
were still some miscellaneous
rants
spread among the varied
raves.
HTML isn't going away. Period. End of discussion.
Short of the sun
going nova, can any reasonable person believe
anything else?
Macromedia Flash MX is just the first part of the
MX approach, and you can bet your boots that Dreamweaver
is nearing the end of a long development cycle too.
Macromedia wouldn't be investing in Dreamweaver if
we really did think that HTML was going away!
Near as I can make out, people setting up that straw
man misread Eric Wittman's partial quote on c|net:
"We've been looking at how people work on the Internet,
how people use Internet applications, and what we
saw was that...HTML was breaking down in a lot of
cases...." This doesn't mean that all uses of HTML
break down!
HTML is great as a document-sharing mechanism. It
can also be used for some web applications too. But
people have been running
into problems when trying to push HTML too far
past its boundaries—when trying to do live data
feeds, or work offline, or include advanced interactivity
across environments. This is one of the problems that
the Flash component of Macromedia MX is trying to
solve.
Or look at it this way, there's a continuum of valuable
delivery formats, each tuned to a different set of
circumstances:
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Plaintext is just text, simple,
straightforward, compact. I think it will become
even more valuable for delivery over the next
few years, even if only for cell phone access
and other
plaintext displays. A presentation optimized
for plaintext is also useful for screen
readers... you could add auditory tips to
a richer presentation, but in some situations
it may be friendlier to make a presentation
optimized for this medium, without the baggage
of the visual version. Plaintext is also great
for text-intensive applications like books.
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Enhanced text includes markup,
graphics, and simple interactivity... what we
have in the browsers today. Styled text can
be seen as useless
whizzery, but it can also provide important
grouping clues in a visual representation. Published
documents -- where one speaker tells many people
-- can benefit greatly from visual cues like
styling and simple layout. Magazines are different
from books. Not everything will require intense
user interaction! Enhanced text presentations
will almost certainly to increase in the future
too.
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A ubiquitous
rich client like Macromedia Flash is the
next level. The compressed binary format is
far more efficient for delivery than uncompressed
text instructions are. The single stream of
delivery requires fewer connections than graphics
in a web page require. The ability to do live
updates from the server without reloading the
entire presentation blows away browser-based
interactions. Including video and audio within
the presentation, rather than walled off in
a separate player, gives you predictable rendering
across multiple environments.
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Fixed-media clients take these
principles a step further, trading ubiquity
and portability for power. Shockwave and Director
can make web presentations, and have excellent PC
web viewership too, but they really come
into their own when you can distribute the application
code to the viewing computer. By requiring more
from the playback computer you can do more too:
realtime 3D rendering, file access, extensibility,
support for more system-specific
functions.
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Native-code applications are
the next step up. If you write the application
instructions from scratch you can get more control
over the specific tasks you want to perform,
but it costs more to develop and is harder to
distribute than other presentations.
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All these delivery methods are valuable, and as the
planet communicates more I'm convinced that each will
grow in absolute numbers. There has been a gap in
the area of ubiquitous rich media clients, though...
client-side Java never took off for various reasons,
and other approaches also recognized the
unsolved problem, but the Macromedia Flash Player
was the engine that was actually massively adopted
by both developers and audiences.
Look at what is delivered in each mechanism... plaintext
gives just the bare conceptual content... enhanced
text gives text, and some media, and some interactivity,
but requires various engines to render.... rich media
clients let you use a known distributed renderer and
so increase designer control while simultaneously
reducing download costs... fixed-media presentations
let you take deeper advantage of the fewer playback
environments... writing everything from scratch lets
you control the system even more. No solution replaces
the others; each serves different needs.
(Sometimes people in those threads got on an SVG
rant, but that has very little relevance to this discussion.
SVG is just a file format for vector graphics, and
never solved the practical problem of widespread computer
viewability. Flash solved both those problems years
ago, and then solved reliable animation and interactivity,
and is now moving towards video integration, efficient
application development, connectivity and communications,
and viewability on portable and embedded devices too.)
So... am I missing something here? It sure sounds
to me that people saying that we're trying to ditch
HTML are erecting straw men just to knock 'em down
again. HTML is great for documents, and has proven
itself for some applications, but can start to creak
and sag when pushed too far into the application space.
If you've got a different take then please let us
all know in this
week's SOAPBOX thread. Thanks!
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