Hello Martin, Monday, November 27, 2006, 2:08:59 PM, you wrote:
>> Flash developers actually *concerned* because of Gnash. They fear >> having different players will make development more difficult. With a >> single Flash player one can be sure that a movie works everywhere. MG> Right, so following that logic, the internet would be a better place MG> if there were only Internet Explorer (or NCSA Mosaic) and no other MG> browser had ever been written. I know what you mean. But the answer might be: If HTML would have been designed specifically for the Internet Explorer, then: maybe yes! The point _is_ that we have some kind of responsibility to avoid a situation like HTML. Unlike the Internet Explorer, the Flash player renders everything correctly what has been designed in the IDE. There's nothing like unknown CSS selectors, misinterpreted definitions, standard deviations or non-standard HTML tags in Flash - you get what you write. So the concerns are not completely wrong. I'm just talking about keeping this in mind. It starts with simple little stupid things, like a fixed aspect ratio and centered position for the player content. In some cases it can be a _big_ problem if this is not correct. (just took this as an example, not saying this is a high priority task). MG> Anyway, you still need to test your movies on windows linux and mac MG> and their enormously expensive embedded players if you want to improve MG> the movie's visibility. In theory this should not be necessary (just like a nice, simple web page renders fine on all web browsers). MG> A professional would test on various different old versions of flash MG> player as well, since I doubt that people running win3.1 *can* upgrade MG> to the latest flash player (yes, they do, all over the world), and we I don't believe there are much Flash developers targeting for win3.1 users :) Normally one chooses the lowest SWF version he thinks has all necessary features and configures it in the publish properties of the file. You can be sure that it will work in that player and all higher versions. Things changed in a newer player do not affect older files. MG> remember the MacroMedia linux port lagging behind the latest whizzo MG> one by a version or two for ages and ages. Given the dodginess and MG> ever increasing resource-hungriness of most commercial program MG> upgrades, some people may not *want* to upgrade. Agree. MG> My own experience with many different browsers led me to use simpler, MG> faster HTML constructs that work absolutely everywhere as far as I MG> know; I welcome the stimulus to Flash developers to do the same. What makes most web pages break are complex design elements (layers, nested tables, ...) that abuse the HTML format to create a fixed layout. Flash however was specifically designed to look equal on each player. There is a much different idea behind HTML and Flash. Flash _invites_ the developer to create sophisticated animations. No Flash developer has to think about "will it work on this or that player". He thinks "does the specification allow me to do...". MG> In fact, having gnash available for your existing flash dev platform MG> makes it *more* likely that your flash movie will work on platforms MG> that you cannot test. Even better. It helps you find bugs earlier. :) Udo _______________________________________________ Gnash-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
