Comments on: Flash moving to an XML-based authoring format

By: Oldes

Oldes — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:19:06 +0000

CS5 has been released and the public XFL spec is not available yet. Because I need to do automatic actions to our complex project sources, I started experimenting with the XFL.

If you can, please answer this question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4082812/xfl-what-are-the-bin-dat-files

thanks.

By: Tyler Wright

Tyler Wright — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 11:20:44 +0000

The Creative Suite 4 has been released – XFL is in use. So when will the public spec be available?

By: Tyler Dockery

Tyler Dockery — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:51:15 +0000

A big issue with many designers I know is the enjoyment of InDesign for its ease of use and layout– but the inability to convert that to the web.
XFL seems like it could really open doors. Indesign seems ready for interactivity, but there is no documentation out there. This could be the springboard for print deisgners getting ready to enter the web design arena (albeit only the flash portion).

By: Rostislav Siryk

Rostislav Siryk — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:05:15 +0000

XFL is so good as we could dream about it.
Now, we know about the brand new Switchboard technology on Adobe Labs, which aimed to allow AIR developers to integrate Creative Suite tools.
XFL + Switchboard… Unpredictable Result! Flash on the Flash. The only thing I can wish here is support for custom tags in XML, or just extensibility.

By: r

Thu, 22 May 2008 12:46:03 +0000

Not that I am saying its better overall, or even really aimed at the same market – but Silverlight has done this via XAML/C# since its very inception.

By: colin moock

colin moock — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 20:14:34 +0000

john, i have to give you credit. i think it was way back at agency.com that you were trying to start a petition (religion?) for an interchange format very much like xfl. you were clearly (8 years) ahead of your time :) you must truly be thrilled! colin [Heh heh--yes indeed, Colin (good memory!). I always argued to folks at Macromedia and Adobe, "Look, I like some features in FreeHand and some in Illustrator, and I can use them together via EPS. Why can't we have something like that for animation on the Web?" So yeah, I'm very excited. --J.]

By: Satheesh

Satheesh — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:17:24 +0000

great info. thx

By: German Bauer

German Bauer — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:34:36 +0000

Excellent – One of the last fortresses of Adobe non-extensibility is falling. For the better of flash customers and developers. Oh, the possibilities… really exciting.

By: Chris Charlton

Chris Charlton — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:17:58 +0000

Isn’t it wonderful!

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:28:51 +0000

This is indeed hopeful news. I did a lot of research to see if I could make an open source FLA reader. All I found was that FLA was a type of OLE file, similar in structure to Word and Excel files, but that everything else was impenetrable binary. [Yeah, we had a similar experience on Photoshop before the Adobe-MM deal went down. I asked a couple of our best guys to try to crack FLA, but no dice. Only the pair at MediaLab ever figured out how to do it, and they did a very limited conversion (bitmaps and layer names). --J.] If Adobe's serious about having more powerful and open-source friendly development tools, getting rid of FLA files is a huge first step.

By: John

John — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:07:36 +0000

This is awesome to hear! With this xml move and the adaptation for common backend languages, would this be a response to Silverlight? [I'm not on the Flash team, so I don't want to speak out of turn. I'm passing along these comments to them, however, in case they want to supply more info. I will say that the idea of using XML to trade design assets is obviously nothing new, so I don't think I'd characterize it as a response to Silverlight. --J.]

By: guest

guest — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:19:55 +0000

its a chance for having a stable flash plugin on unix. do opensource the specification and external devels will care about writing a gnu stack. the closed source flash plugin currectly really is a shame for your company

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:37:12 +0000

Ahhh, so what you’re saying is that Adobe is going to create something like Swfmill? ;)

By: Sean Upton

Sean Upton — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:18:30 +0000

Compound document stored in zip file, using XML: not a friend of source control. I would also suggest/hope that it be possible to have this resource expanded on the filesystem to work with native tools (Flash CS4) and command-line tools (e.g. build and svn). Subversion integration within the Flash CS4 IDE sounds like a good idea, while Adobe is at it. -Sean

By: Ben Clinkinbeard

Ben Clinkinbeard — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:38:59 +0000

This is definitely a big deal, but I hope Adobe realizes how vital a command line compiler is to making this reach its potential. With a command line compiler the entire designer-developer workflow becomes automatable so that one designer can be updating images and other assets while another updates animations and motion and the developer cranks out code. Either through an Ant task or some continuous integration tool you can then compile the assets SWFs that the Flex app loads for styling, etc.
If executed correctly this could be really huge.