JD on EP

... I'm speaking generally about devices here; I've got no inside track on Apple news. When devices don't support SWF, customers complain, that's what I see.

I don't miss Flash on my iPhone, as AT&T's EDGE network is ridiculously slow and most Flash content is either an advertisement or superfluous. However, there are moments when it's needed because web designers made the bad decision of only including some information in a SWF that could have been made available otherwise. In the end, I don't want Flash on my iPhone as much as I want web designers to consider the most appropriate format to convey information. [jd sez: Feel the same about JPG?]

Followup commentary on the article focuses on the variance among mobile browsers.

No presentation layer has yet really solved the problem of resolution-independence -- HTML, SWF, PDF, none automatically work as well at 320x240 as 1280x740 or whatever. But even though desktop WWW browsers have converged on a few major configurations the past year, once you get out of the laptop formfactor user-agents diverge again, and it's hard to predict the user experience if you can't predict the user runtime.

Perhaps I don't understand your question about JPEGs? I don't regularly encounter websites made entirely of JPEGs. Even if I did, my feelings are the same: web designers must make better decisions about the most appropriate approach for presenting information. Progressive enhancement techniques becomes more important as more display scenarios arise.

Jeremiah, in a perfect world you would see any content on the web on any device. I should see all the sites on the 'net in IE 5, but that's not reality. While I agree that some critical content should be presented in alternate forms, flash sometimes is the best way to convey SOME content.

Think of flash video, for example. Flash video alone makes me want flash on my iTouch (you might not want it due to EDGE on your iPhone, but some of us use iPhones via wi-fi and have iTouches).

Jeremiah's comments are not uncommon, but they sound to me like a cranky codger railing against teh rock 'n roll; there are still people who like to browse with Lynx, but obviously there is a large segment of the population that is interested in sound, animation, video and advanced interactivity, which is what Flash provides, on a magnitude better than any other platform.

Also, not all content is a web page, and the restrictions that web devs bring with them (namely the page metaphor), greatly restrict how rich media content is presented. (disclosure: I am an interactive content developer for a large media company, where we develop narrative content for handheld devices, quite a different animal than 'web dev at large')

I think the iPhone situation illustrates this nicely--web devs have had it all to themselves for 6 months, and while there have been some neat apps created for it, the barriers are just too high for creating truly immersive interactive multimedia content via HTML.

otoh, if/when the Flash plugin comes out for the iPhone, you'll see lots of apps that push into places that most web devs never even dream about...