- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:59:31 -0500
- To: "Kugelman, John" <jkugelman@progeny.net>
- CC: Vincent Berger <vincent.berger@afp.com>, www-forms@w3.org
Kugelman, John wrote: > Flash provides a capability that is unavailable in HTML. You can’t do > movies and animation in HTML. It still took years for Flash to really > take off and get to where it is now where authors can just depend on it > being installed, and can make web sites based on it. And even still, > most web sites that use Flash have an equivalent non-Flash version. And Flash availability is greatly overestimated. I think one browser out of 5 or so on my main machine can handle Flash. None of the browsers on my wifes' computers can. I see similar results on at least half of the computers owned by individual adults. (Childrens' and teenagers' computers seem more likely to have Flash.) Server side measurements of plugin availability are highly self-selected and usually statistically invalid. XForms availability is close enough to nil so as not to matter. Requiring XForms on the client is essentially requiring a custom runtime environment for your software. It eliminates all benefits of browser based distribution and web applications. You might as distribute a thick client. One year this may change, but 2006 is not that year. 2007 probably isn't either. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
Received on Monday, 31 October 2005 19:59:37 UTC