I follow John Dowdell's JD on MX weblog because I want to believe that Flash is a viable way of making decent middleweight client applications available in a cross-platform manner.

With the release of their latest MX editions, Macromedia has been pushing Flash MX as the solution for creating rich clients. I think they're headed in the right direction, but I also think they aren't quite there yet, mostly for performance reasons; every one of their flagship apps I've tried feels clunky to me, even on fairly powerful computers.

Anyway, I generally dig what ol' JD has to say, even though as a Macromedia employee he's pretty clearly biased. But this post about 3D web standards shows a dangerous M$ slant on standards: "The Shockwave Player is a standard, because 40% of consumers tested by Media Metrix in June could view it. "

I think JD's a little confused about what makes a standard. SVG, HTML, CSS, SMIL, TCP/IP are standards. Applications aren't.

Speaking of which, JD, when is the Flash player going to support SVG? Even the smallest subset of SVG like SVG Tiny or SVG Basic would be incredible. Flash has the better renderer in terms of speed and text quality, and I want to use it with SVG. So there.

posted on 7/23/2002 04:04:00 PM