On Sunday 31 August 2003 14:14, RTaylor wrote: > Adobe's viewer is free... so's Corels. Installation's no more > complex than installing the Flash viewer. Both companies > offer Ease of installation doesn't count as much when every proprietary browser (and most Linux distributions) comes with Flash preinstalled. > As far as audio goes... Real's Helix project gives you the > http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/ > https://www.helixcommunity.org/2002/intro/potential-projects > tools to do anything you need at the same level of quality > that any other system on the 'net can give you. Let me know when it's integrated with the SVG tools, with synchronization and all, the way MP3 and other audio formats are integrated with SWF. Have you actually looked at what people are doing with Flash these days? These guys are visual artists, and they don't want to hear about SMIL and interleaved MPEG-4. They want to hear about "File/Save As", and they're willing to pay (and put up with proprietary formats) for it. > It's as capable and usable as SWF... There's absolutely no > reason not to use it. When I see someone do something as nifty as the homestar or campchaos.com stuff using the hodgepodge of tools and formats you're describing, I'll believe that. > Any artist worth his salt researches his tools to a fairly > high degree. {Tho' that does seem to be going out of favor} Those who do will come to the conclusion (currently a correct one) that they'll reach 90% or more of users using Flash and.... substantially less for SVG. And Macromedia will sell another $500 worth of Windows or Mac-only software. Just as I think the PNG guys were short-sighted in trying to introduce another unsupported format (MNG) for animations, rendering PNG an incomplete alternative to GIF, I think that if the SVG guys are really trying to replace Flash (rather than just another graphics metafile format) they will need to find a way to integrate other media that makes sense to artists, not just to nerds like you and me. Rob
