Reply to post: It was dead but it didn't show...

Amazon to trash Flash, as browsers walk away

ChubbyBehemoth

It was dead but it didn't show...

The main problem is that the logical alternative for Flash, SVG has been badly implemented since it became a recommendation (in 2003!!!). MS only now supports part of it since IE9 and still refuses to implement SMIL, forcing authors to use javascript for that. Doing animation in SMIL is simple, straightforward and flexible, whereas doing that in javascript is mind boggling and painful. Soon we should be able to use web animations using CSS, which is not a recommendation yet and is a bitch to author compared to SMIL. Hooray, W3C et all,...

Another dud was Firefox not implementing SVG fonts, in part for valid reasons, but not taking the use of that for the easy creation of Sprites into account. No doubt type foundries also had their play in that. The only browser engine that had decent support for SVG was Presto. Alas, Opera has blinked itself out of significance these days by using Googles engine and letting them decide what is important. Fast rendering lean browsers are not a forte of anything webKit based it seems and SVG support is broken at many places, probably also in wait for SVG 2.0 to get recommendation status.

SVG 2.0 is being heralded as fixing browser support problems, but looks like a subset of SVG 1.1 in many cases as to make all browsers have full support for it. Some very useful extensions are in it as well, ARIA roles, CMYK support, mesh warp fills and text areas rather than the crude text lines, but a lot of sexy stuff has been deprecated and replaced with vastly more complicated solutions.

Take with that the total absence of any high end authoring tools for SVG animation, which is to be expected as no-one in his right mind is making that if support lacks on many platforms, and you get the idea why Flash has managed to float its rotting corpse across the web for such a long time. Kudos for Adobe to manage to make the whole transition so arduously slow that they can still sell you the Flash authoring tools.

Let's just hope that we finally get some action in this field of web tech now the bigger names start throwing bricks at it. With some luck some brave soul will create a js framework to make backwards support for the stuff that SVG 2.0 left out. I for one loved using SVG fonts.

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