My OperaA Lesson in Open Standards
Friday, July 21, 2006 2:11:15 PM
Everyone in the blogging world is probably familiar with YouTube - the super popular online video site that allows sharing of movies. They've done a great job in making it very simple for people to include these little clips in the pages and blogs. So what's my gripe? They've recently upgraded their movie player to the newest version of Flash - which is incompatible with all previous versions. Now, all these movies are broken for people that haven't upgraded.
No big deal - the changing of times. You should expect an upgrade will be necessary from time to time. My gripe isn't really with YouTube - they're apparently adding features. Innovation on the Internet is absolutely imperative for survival. It'd be nice if they had a fall-back, but whatever.
My gripe is with Macromedia and closed standards in general. I'm using Linux exclusively. It's obviously been A) too difficult and / or B) not worth the expense to support my platform. This now means that these services are rendered useless for me and all other Linux users. This reminds me of years past when Microsoft and Netscape were fighting to add proprietary elements of HTML to then have a strangle-hold on all net surfers. If there were an open standard on these Flash files, someone (either a corporate entity or volunteers) would have an opportunity to port the player, or otherwise create some kind of fall-back. Of course, I wouldn't expect Macromedia to think it's reasonable to give out their source-code, but the situation in itself is a bit troubling.
In summation: screw Flash.
No big deal - the changing of times. You should expect an upgrade will be necessary from time to time. My gripe isn't really with YouTube - they're apparently adding features. Innovation on the Internet is absolutely imperative for survival. It'd be nice if they had a fall-back, but whatever.
My gripe is with Macromedia and closed standards in general. I'm using Linux exclusively. It's obviously been A) too difficult and / or B) not worth the expense to support my platform. This now means that these services are rendered useless for me and all other Linux users. This reminds me of years past when Microsoft and Netscape were fighting to add proprietary elements of HTML to then have a strangle-hold on all net surfers. If there were an open standard on these Flash files, someone (either a corporate entity or volunteers) would have an opportunity to port the player, or otherwise create some kind of fall-back. Of course, I wouldn't expect Macromedia to think it's reasonable to give out their source-code, but the situation in itself is a bit troubling.
In summation: screw Flash.
