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September 27, 2007
Just another draft review
Just another draft review: Ric Smith starts off with a technology comparison at Sys-Con, but a couple of lines bothered me enough to try to correct. A new acronym is introduced... "HD RIA" expanded to "high-definition RIA", but I'm not sure of the sustainability of that term, which refers to use of vectors rather than very large displays of pixels. "More than half of users prompted to upgrade a plug-in upon visiting a site often abandon the redirect to download software and navigate to another site." That might be true for browser extensions which don't already enjoy overwhelming market acceptance, but Adobe Flash Player can't have half of visitors refusing updates, or else v9 couldn't have gotten to +90% viewability... knowing the source link for the stat would help in understanding it. "The 83.4% market share enjoyed by Flash 9 pales in comparison to the native AJAX support found in modern browsers such as IE 7.0, FireFox 2.0, and Safari 3.0." This is the kind of stat I hate, and which prompted me to post. ;-) The problem with vague labels like "Ajax" is that there's no firm measurement... how many browsers handle CSS correctly? Even use of PNG is problematic. You've got to say how much "Ajax" the browsers share... lots of 'em do a little, but tain't no way you get richer Flash-like capabilities in a single development fork to greater degree than Player just via HTML/JS/CSS. It seems plausible that more than 93% of currently-deployed browsers can retrieve text without a page-refresh, but when you get into CSS or SVG or CANVAS, much less video or even basic audio, nobody knows how many implementations there are, how many development & testing paths there must be. Just because a single label "ajax" can be applied to multiple things, doesn't mean that all those things are actually functionally equivalent. But many people don't understand "the map is not the territory". "AJAX, unlike HD RIA solutions, is built on open standards such as (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HD RIA is traditionally proprietary with few open source options, much less standards." I can't affect the XHTML spec, much less its varied implementations. Adobe has had good stewardship of PostScript -- dismissing with "because it's proprietary" is sloppy thinking. (That's enough of this article, I don't want to read any more.... ;-)
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 27, 2007 6:55 AM