[Nettime-bold] FLASH v. HTML

[Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu>]

Some thoughts--

At 2:20 PM +0200 4/19/02, Florian Cramer wrote:
>While of course it is doubtful whether HTML will still be used and HTML
>browsers will still widely exist in the year 2100, anybody will be able
>to look up the W2C HTML specification in a library and write a program
>that displays ancient 20/21st century web pages. The same is impossible
>for Flash.

Proprietary systems haven't stopped people from creating emulators 
that allow "out-of-print" video gaming consoles to be re-experienced. 
Why would it stop emulator authors a hundred years from now?

At 2:20 PM +0200 4/19/02, Florian Cramer wrote:
>But the multimegabyte download of the Flash plugin + signing of the
>proprietary "End User License Agreement" (EULA) hasn't ruled it out for
>you?

The largest of the Flash downloads is version six, which is 660K, not 
multimegabytes.

At 2:20 PM +0200 4/19/02, Florian Cramer wrote:
>So your
>choice would be to, for example, dial into the Internet with AOL or MSN
>or ditch .mp3 in favor of .wma with "Digital Rights Management" just
>because the software was pre-installed on your computer?

You'd have to ditch mp3 too--since Microsoft is, to use your terms, 
just giving it away like a heroin pusher.  It's really hard to use NO 
properietary systems.

Also, if you are forced to optimized your HTML for Macs and WIndows 
versions of IE and netscape, and Palms, and so on, aren't you 
controlled by MORE proprietary systems than the Flasher designer who 
is enslaved by Macromedia and achieve cross-platform stability?

-- 
Brandon Barr
University of Rochester
http://brandonbarr.com

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