>> The continued rise of AJAX would seem to suggest that the browser is still going strong , at least to me anyway. Client side scripting has come on leaps and bounds since the dark old days of DHTML . There are several APIs for doing cross browser AJAX some of which feature drawing apis which will get you close to the flash look . It will undoubtedly be harder than flash and not as slick.
No doubt that the browser is currently the dominant mechanism for, well, web browsing. Whether this will continue to be the case into the foreseeable future was my question, put another way. Already the need exists to go outside the provisions of browser protocols to access multimedia content. Admittedly, extensions (or plugins) are included in the protocols to accommodate multimedia but there are plenty of non-browser technologies in use as well - chat clients, skype, newsreaders and the like. >> For me Flash is an unacceptable compromise in any website <snip> What gets me is that it doesn't degrade , at all . you don't have the plugin or even the latest version of the plugin you don't get the site . Yet according to Macromedia's own (biased?) statistics Flash has a greater dominance on the web than any single brand of browser: Browser stats put the top two brands combined at 94% total compared to Flash at 98%: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Flash stats: http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/tech_breakdown. html I'm not advocating the use of Flash here, just pointing out that already it's usual to go outside the base browser technology to deliver content that's more complex than text and still images. >>The success of the web for me is in its use of open standards , flash is going the wrong my IMHO. >>Ever tried navigating a flash site with speech reader , braille pad , set-top-box browser , text mode only or mobile phone ? Usability issues abound, certainly, but open standards are only as good as the tools available to work with them. Take your speech reader example, for example. I'd love to be able to test my sites for use on a speech reader but there are no open source speech readers around (afaik) and the commercial varieties are pricey. You've got a point with mobile as far as text based content goes, but what about feeding mobile devices with audio/video content? Here again we're looking at extensions with the browser protocols acting as middleware. >>I don't think plugins have been as important as you think , take google for example there flagship sites use no plugins at all and are some of the best and , most crucially , the busiest on the web. Sure, but only for highly specialized applications and with very large amounts of money invested on the server side to gather, process, store, format, and present the output content. >> Amazon , yahoo and ebay are the same , simple standards compliant sites with good content. To an extent standardization is responsible for their success, and also for the success of Flash. Relational database underpins these sites on the server side, a technology that's ubiquitous on hosting services. And that's the other side of Flash's success story as well, that open source Flash servers are available that allow hosting companies to support it inexpensively. So, I'll buy the argument that standardization is the key, but... >>If you don't want to conquer the web then use flash but otherwise stick with the standards and help make them better. As desirable as this may be, is the world evolving faster than any standard? Let's generalize beyond Flash, and think beyond the browser too, and beyond the religions of operating systems (open source v. Wintel etc). Is a browser even necessary? What would it take to cut the browser out of the picture entirely? (and to the inevitable response of 'why would you want to do that' I hold that it's a process that's already underway and that the Beeb will need to adapt.) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Amias Channer Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:01 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [backstage] 3D? <snip> - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
