They don't think.

They go "Ooooh, pretty!!" with a sheepish grin, jump
up and down and clap their hands in excitement.

Kind of like the people who ask for avatars on LQ! ;}


Cheers,
Tink

That reminds me that one of the things I like about LQ is no big, flashy, distracting avatars!

Agreed! I like to think of my SN as a sort of "avatar" in itself. Same with others' SNs.

I've seen forums where people will have a rather distracting animated GIF for their avatar picture

(or you could be really nerdy and use an animated PNG instead, and only annoy those who have support for it (i.e. people with Mozilla browsers))

I think there are some reasonable uses for Flash with respect to interactive presentations such as certain type of CBTs (Computer Based Training), and perhaps sale presentations.

"Interactive" is the key word here, because obviously there are many preferable alternatives if all you want to to is show an animation / movie.

In this day and age of advanced "Web 2.0" JavaScript with all its AJAXy goodness, there is no excuse for Flash navigation.

I agree that there are some good applications for Flash, if only it was open-source.

And it does seem that you could make all the fancy navigation you want with JavaScript and not use Flash.

Not that there isn't already too much javascript out there either. It's become impossible to surf anywhere without constantly bypassing pages in noscript. Whatever happened to, you know, just simple links to stuff, in plain html?

So many web designers are out there trying to reinvent the wheel, and doing it badly.

PC-BSD has good flash support - so any day now

I was watching the news as OGG support was being considered for inclusion into the HTML5 standard. Ultimately it came down to this: OGG support wouldn't be included because Apple didn't want it, and Apple didn't want it (supposedly) because they didn't have a OGG hardware decoder available for use in all their little toys.

So basically, what Apple wants at any given moment is more important the long term openness and freedom on the Internet.

Anyway, Firefox has native Ogg Theora support, so use it as much as you can personally. Maybe if it becomes popular enough some day, IE and the other browsers will be forced to support it.

They didn't incluge OGG in HTML5 just because Apple's gadgets don't have a hardware OGG decoder?

I'm pretty sure you can get OGG decoder chips and any big mail-order electronics store.

I condensed that down because this has been the same argument (with different players) since corporations took interest in the internet at all.

Corporate interests have always been making things more difficult, be it CSS, XHTML, Canvas, or anything else that was the technology du jour.

The solution remains the same. Use what works - help people to use what works. The big slow corporate players eventually shift.

I use tinyogg.com to encode youtube videos in OGG and present me in a nice way. It is in beta stage and you need to wait about 10 minutes because your video will be queued for processing. Not for everyone but I don't mind queuing a couple of videos in advance and checking back later. Just an ugly workaround for a stupid, artificial problem(h264 patents)

I didn't know about TinyOgg. How to you get the actual URL of the Flash video in YouTube, though?

Flash is so so so slow but evreything seems to use it.

LOL

Anyone?