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August 17, 2006
That ol' EMBED tag
That ol' EMBED tag: I've been reading the standardista/flashista debate [[1], [2], [3], [4]]... I'm really uncomfortable, I like and respect both groups of people, even though we may not agree precisely on all issues. (Core issue: HTML 4.0 spec outlawed EMBED tags but browsers don't yet implement consistently... how do we distribute creative works while balancing between practicality and idealism?) Scott Fegette sits next to me on Townsend St., and today we were talking, both flummoxed by it... good people, all of whom care about what we're accomplishing here, but at odds on specific issues. I've got no solution, I'll acknowledge that up front. But I *do* have some anecdotes about where we've been, how much progress we've made, both in digital video and interactivity on computers, and also on the open extensibility of Netscape 2.0 and above. Could we look at how far we've come, for a moment...? [in the extended entry]
Disclaimers: Some of this is ancient history, pre-Web, so I don't usually talk about it... take from it what you will. I'm also speaking from my own imperfect experience here, and I know that other people see a fuller picture than I do... corrections appreciated. It's just me talking, warts and all.
I wrote the following in one pass Thursday evening, after taking a long walk, having a couple of beers, walking and thinking some more. Tomorrow morning I need to research, link, and correct the spelling on some of the filetype names (will be written within *asterisks* tonight if dubious), and do a proofing run, but if you'll accept the casualness with which this was written tonight, then let's go....
Update: Links added, file format names corrected, 7pm PDT Sat Aug 19.
Video on a computer screen... very exciting. By the late 1980s I had seen the new vector drawing styles, and was going to a by-the-hour Desktop Publishing storefront downtown to set type for point-of-purchase signage, working with Aldus Pagemaker 3.0, Aldus FreeHand 2.0, and very excited by a machine which had Photoshop 1.0 on it. In the evenings I was going to BMUG, the PC Users Group, and the Macromedia User Forum, hosted by tech support staff Jeff Essex (SoundEdit & Director), Scott Kildall (Lingo & 3D tools), Doug Wyrick (Authorware), and Sasha Magee (who's working on the Flex team today).
The Macromedia animation format was *FLIC* PICS, a Mac-only delta-frame animation format, 16KB max size. Director could sequence such scenes at runtime, but Macromedia Accelerator compiled it into a single *FLC* PICS file. But we also distributed the CoSA QuickPICS formats, stronger, more flexible, higher-performance, requiring its own rendering engine. The PC was less advanced, and eventually moved to other formats like FLI/FLC... they eventually picked up on the CompuServe GIF format... the Amiga was very important yet had its own animation formats, some of which got ported.
None of these could handle captured imagery... at best they used run-length encoding for a frame, and then did a dirty-rect comparison of changed areas, painting over the smallest rectangle enclosing the changes from the last frame. Equilibrium DeBabelizer was a specialist tool to convert among all these animation formats. But for realworld imagery, the best you could do was import a series of photographs and page-flip.
So when QuickTime arrived, it was really significant. At the MacWorld when it was introduced, I got the first QT floppy copied out of the Arizona Macintosh Users Group. (No net distribution, not even CDs... you brought a floppy and they copied it for you. No viruses then.) (And yes, QuickTime 1.0 fit on a floppy.)
You could show people talking. Through a computer screen. It was jerky and postage-stamp-sized, true. Who cared? It was imperfect, but liberating. You could use a video-recorder, and digitize it through a special hardware card, and put it on a floppy, and give it to your friend, and look there's a guy talking, and it was really, really, really exciting.
My point? Now, here in August 2006, we've got millions upon millions of ordinary people buying cheap digital recorders and pushing directly to YouTube and other sites. There's instant distribution, around the world, incredibly democratized. People jump around pages to see what they want, they discover materials they hadn't expected. This is far more exciting now, isn't it?
But I skipped ahead, let's go back to mid-90s, to early World Wide Web days and before. On the Macromedia CompuServe forum Oogie McGuire had been talking up the Mosaic browser... I tried it, but my service provider didn't offer internet yet, just walled-garden, and I wasn't sure what was going on but I understood the principles. Oogie and Dorian Dowse and others talked about what it would be like if we could embed a multimedia engine inside a WWW browser, jumping among presentations, updated instantly on the server, freedom of choice, easy distribution.
So when Netscape 1.0 folks stopped by the San Francisco Macromedia User Forum they said how they'd like to work with Director developers, in some new ways they were thinking of to add multiple media types and interactivity to these HTML page layouts, I lobbied hard internally for it. I wasn't in on any of the decision processes, but I was really happily surprised when Netscape announced their 2.0 browser, with extensibility, and Macromedia announced that we'd be bringing the Director engine to the World Wide Web as Shockwave. Really happy.
Where was video in all this? Not even considered, it was to laugh... bandwidth costs would be far too large. By this time Microsoft had done their own video approach (the QuickTime for Windows stories were particularly notorious), and video was mostly for same-platform display... CD-ROMs used video, but early Shockwave web content was *real* sparse on media, lots of tricks to get things below 50 kilobytes.
Progressive Networks was one of the first to focus on audio on the web, probably *the* first, other than Java's .AU files... Apple's AIFF and Microsoft's WAV were too big. Progressive's Real Audio had a Shockwave Xtra so that you could combine audio and interactivity. Things later got tense between the two companies when Shockwave was the first commercial enterprise to license the new MP3 audio codec from Fraunhoffer... their perceptual encoding offered 10:1 compression or better without degradation. Progressive took a hit when Macromedia deployed this efficient audio format to the web. It was a little galling when three years later people started raving about the first generic-MP3 files, particularly as Shockwave was by far the most widely-deployed MP3 player by that point, but that was how internet audio evolved.
But video? That was still just not practical. It took a few years for Apple to get to the plugin stage, and Microsoft followed this with their own format, and meanwhile Progressive Networks had expanded their Real Media offerings to include video. These were destination pieces, opening in someone else's branded chrome, and you probably know what a hassle it was to figure which format to use, how to compress, deploy and support three video architectures to meet your audience's needs..... ;-)
How did video integrate with the browser? Netscape 2.0 was first to support arbitrary media types, 1995 or so, and they used an EMBED tag. The spirit of HTML at that time was that we've got certain standard tags (de facto standards!), and that browsers should just ignore tags they didn't recognize. This attitude flipped around towards the HTML 4.0 days, but Netscape introduced new abilities in their browser through the EMBED tag, and we could do new stuff.
Microsoft subsequently introduced their own extension mechanism (the existing system-level ActiveX Controls they had from Visual Basic and the like, not the existing neutral Netscape Plugin extension mechanism), invoked by their own tag (a new Microsoft OBJECT tag, not the existing EMBED tag invented by Netscape). I'm not sure who at Macromedia researched nesting the EMBED tag within the OBJECT tag to handle all the popular browsers, but this innovation was soon followed by other plugins.
In the late 1990s I learned on WebMonkey or WebDesign-L that the HTML 4.0 spec was considering prohibition of the EMBED tag. (I figured this was some type of Microsoft vs Netscape play within the standards group, but I never did learn how the W3C reached this decision.) I asked on the lists "Hey, we've been doing this for 3-4 years now, there's a lot of existing content that the new spec would break. How do we get to there from here?" I got no replies -- early "web standards" arguments didn't ever engage the question, didn't even acknowledge it. In retrospect I wish I had been more of a jerk and confronted people on it, but I just kept asking the questions, not getting any reply.
Today? The public loves video in a WWW browser. Video is a valid and necessary media type -- it reaches people in ways that text, images, audio, and even animation do not. I'm convinced that the response to this year's video sites proves that web video fulfills a real human need. The world needs video and engaging media experiences. The world's response proves it; if you don't approve, you'll have to learn to live with it.
We also have ongoing worries about how the internet's WWW publishing mechanism will evolve. There's lots of money, prestige involved; lots of angles for small groups to finagle behind the scenes for personal gain... I'm personally relying on the distributed wisdom of the crowd to be skeptical on lots of angles of web development... lots of these suspicions may eventually prove unfounded, but I'm convinced we do need people to fight for what they believe.
So how do we resolve the needs of people who want to deliver the best experiences to their audiences, with those who want to preserve the integrity of the web as they see it? Cutting each other some slack may be the ticket, I suspect. There's *lots* of good people who want the web to evolve further, and we're not always completely aligned... the accessibility people, the Ajax/Web20 people, the searchable web people, the standardistas, the rich-experience afficionados, opensource efforts as well as commercial work... following just one path and ignoring the others won't get us where we want to go, I reckon.
Please, let the ad-hominems fly by... the other person's saying that because they care about something deeply. Focusing instead on the arguments, seeing the needs of different groups, surviving the cruel ambiguity of reconciling multiple sets of priorities at once, and cutting each other some slack... these, I suspect, will bring about the things we all want, more reliably.
Look... here are some tourists, excited to be on The Bund... I don't know what they're saying, but I see that I have much in common with them.... Look! there's this guy on my computer screen, and he's talking, and I LIKE THIS A LOT, and.....
... and hey, it's late, let me clamber down this soapbox and crawl off to bed. Be good to each other, okay? ;-)
Posted by JohnDowdell at August 17, 2006 11:24 PM
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