JD on EP

One persistent theme which I don't recall seeing so strongly there before is that there's some type of "web fundamentalism" which stresses a text hairshirt over the approachability of multiple media... "This anti-flash, anti-ease-of-use, anti-glamour, anti-aesthetic, anti-comfort, anti-authoritian attitude reminds me of the C.P.Snow divide between the Sciences and Humanities. I feel the need for our coming together."

In followups to the same thread someone says that they like the improved richness: "Just to be different than your current customers, I watched the Sparkle video and I can tell you I am excited about application development for the first time since the apps in HTML crap phase we've been in for 5 years. The only hate I have is the fact that it is at least a year away."

There's a bit of XAML vs XUL debate, but it didn't get many followup comments. There's an SVG angle too.

One good line in a later thread gets practical: "The only way to stop this is to offer a superior alternative." (I like this because it isn't arguing against something so much as arguing for something.)

There's a strange disconnect in a pro-Laszlo comment: "If you want to build web applications that have a rich user experience, check out OpenLaszlo [openlaszlo.org]. It's based on Flash (which is ubiquitous) and it's open source." We'll use a modifiable-source-code development environment to create for an on-other-peoples-machines engine, and this is better in some way...?

There's a nice mention of opensource SWF contributions.

Plenty of funny ones too...

"Dude MS is making a flash killer. It's gonna KILL flash. Macromedia is as good as dead now. So nobody better buy macromedia products or use flash or nothing. MS is going to kill flash. I know because Ballmer threw a chair across the room! MS is going to kill macromedia right after they kill borland, novell, google, oracle, SAP, Sony, Nintendo, and AOL." [link]

"(Q) Flash, Sparkle, what's next, Twinkle?" "(A) Kellog's Rice Crispies! Oh wait.. wrong jingle..." [link]

"What?! No more Flash-based Microsoft Ads?" [link]

One short thread gets into whether a UI should be skinned for the operating system, or for the application style. (This is a hard question -- Director users struggled with it in the mid-90s, and I never saw a firm consensus emerge on one side or the other.) Should an interface be consistent across environments, or just consistent with other things within one environment?

Lots of comments about downloading nearly a gigabyte to watch an hour of video -- if you're on the right platform and browser to begin with.

"Okay, enough of the mis-directed Flash-bashing... I mean really, do you blame photoshop every time you see a bad image?" [link]

Someone sort of awkwardly says that Flash will be more "open" than Sparkle (terms underdefined), but then someone follows up by noting an unuseful modding-down of opensource SWF info.

Good quote: "The big problem is that there are really no good open standards for what Flash does. Just pieces here and there. SVG is part of it, Ajax another part - and good luck trying to weld them together." (Me: If you look at the runaway success of Breeze, then realtime video, directed-viewing and more are becoming as important as vector graphics and dynamic text retrieval.)

The WPF/E assertion comes in for some skepticism... it's hard to balance "we'll take best use of one system's abilities" with "other people won't be locked out". Then again, some take the "will run great without Vista" argument at face value.

Very strong comment on demand-side user experience... worth a read in whole, but here's the payoff line: "the day they start thinking about USERS before they think about developers will be the day that i'll be scared of Microsoft."

Being accessible in many environments, in a "lesser of two evils" kind of way: "Seriously folks, let's hope the world's web developers steer clear of this. Flash is cross-platform and it's one of the key tools that make the non-Microsoft desktop useful. I know, I know, as a techie you probably hate all those "punch the monkey!" ads, but think...."