"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

On and Of the Web

Apollo is like Emacs and people are thinking all you need is Notepad.

From an interview with Mitchell Baker of Mozilla...

Dan Warne (APC): One does wonder why Microsoft would bother with Silverlight when it is so late into the game.

Mitchell Baker: But it is so critical, I mean we're doing the same thing and we're doing the same thing because Flash - yes it's proprietary so to us that's kind of a problem, but why does it really matter? Well it doesn't live - it is on the web, but not of the web, it's not searchable, it doesn't share all the features of the browser, you can't operate it, it lives in a little box.

That's not the point. The point is a flash (flex) application can access data that *is* on the web, searchable, etc. by any kind of web client software. It's just the flash (flex) application will be easier to develop and more capable than the typical ajax application.

I hope mozilla gets this before too long. The current state of the browser is, well, poor. Before too long, apollo will be a much better platform for writing browsers and other web-based systems than mozilla/xul.

Reading this...

I imagine there are probably efforts to move it out of the box, but to really integrate with the rest of the web, some of those capabilities ought to be in the web client, which is the browser. And so we continue to hope on that front, but also to develop graphics capabilities ourselves.
...I just don't think she *gets* it. Apollo is like Emacs and people are thinking all you need is Notepad. Apollo subsumes the browser. It is not some other thing.

(Aside: The swf file itself (actionscript byte code) is not searchable, etc. unless you choose to provide the source -- it has a "view source" capability, a co-worker showed me the other day. But that's not a good way to provide web resources unless the resource is a swf file you want to execute in a flash vm.)

2 comments:

asbjornu said...

I wonder if it's perhaps you who doesn't "get" it. You're speaking of Flash and Apollo as a new technology that is revolutionizing the web and making the web itself deprecated. That without supporting it, you'll be left behind in the stone age eating raw meat because you don't know how to make a fire. It may be like that to you, and I'm glad Flash and Apollo has changed your life in such a huge way, but demanding that everyone else shares your view is going too far, imnsho.

If Flash went Open Source or got standardized as an international standard, the situation would be completely different. Kudos to Adobe for doing this for PDF; equal kudos if they do it for Flash. But until they do, Flash is nothing more than any other proprietary, binary blob on the internet, like .xls and .doc files.

Patrick Logan said...

Em, where did I say this "deprecated the web"???

Em, did you read the part where Flex can and should call out to resources on the web, using web protocols???

Seems to me you are the unreasonable reactionary, locked in a prejudiced view of the world.

So to speak.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.