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Many sites deliver video by H.264 in the absence of Flash. It is seamless to the user, and there are no blue legos. The fact that Flash is missing from iPhone

Many sites deliver video by H.264 in the absence of Flash. It is seamless to the user, and there are no blue legos. The fact that Flash is missing from iPhones and iPod Touches, and that people with those devices are using the web, produced this situation. The "Dark Age" is already here, and it's not a dark age. The link I submitted is indeed both an example of the "Dark Age problem" of HTML5 (that Firefox refuses to support H.264); and that video can be delivered quite satisfactorily via HTML5, without Flash.

tolmasky 17y ago
I believe we are confusing what we are discussing. It does no good to take someone's words out of context and display them in a political-style sound byte, as seems to be the case here. In every one of my posts I have always said that HTML 5 will be strictly better, but that Adobe's CTO was absolutely correct that currently (and unless the trajectory changes in the future too), we will be jettisoned backwards into a world where we have to create multiple versions of things. We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing intelligently. The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory. We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think "what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 . However, I can see that there exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to "HTML5"). Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works... everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved. The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use it to fix it.

tolmasky 17y ago

I believe we are confusing what we are discussing. It does no good to take someone's words out of context and display them in a political-style sound byte, as seems to be the case here. In every one of my posts I have always said that HTML 5 will be strictly better, but that Adobe's CTO was absolutely correct that currently (and unless the trajectory changes in the future too), we will be jettisoned backwards into a world where we have to create multiple versions of things. We're all on the same page here, we want there to be open standards for video on the web, and that standard will be HTML 5. My point to you is that the current method of proselytizing this is preaching to the choir and not effective to the people that matter. If I ran a moderately successful medium traffic website, and I saw what the CTO said, then saw your response, clicked on it, and found that it didn't work on just about every browser, I would have to agree with the CTO, and then I may not bother expending the energy on switching the content on my site. Its simply a matter of fighting this thing intelligently. The situation with the iPhone/iPod Touch not having Flash is not hunky dory. We live in a bubble where we simply don't use Flash that much and think "what's the big deal". I am 100% guilty of this myself. I am thrilled Flash is not on the iPhone and I absolutely hate Flash on my computer, exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057673 . However, I can see that there exist use cases outside of my own experiences: I am not an 11 year old kid that plays Flash games all the time. What's scary to me is that a lot of people say that native SDK apps will fill the void here (as opposed to "HTML5"). Secondly, the problems with video on the web are still very real and unresolved. Firefox not supporting H.264 is not just some "bug", they are religiously against it. They refuse to put it into versions of Firefox that ship to countries where patents are not enforceable. It seems that the emphasis will be on the developer/user to figure out the story with that (just like before it was up to you to install xvid or quicktime or whatever, this is BAD). While we see this as a neat opportunity to tell developers to do it "the right way", many business will simply ask "why if Flash already works... everywhere... today". And again, no one seems to address the IE issue. If your answer is "not a problem", this thing won't get resolved. The big conclusion here is not "Flash rocks". Its hey there are some real but tractable problems. Instead of exhausting our energy trying to convince people these problems don't exist or aren't really that much to worry about, lets use it to fix it.