On 01/05/2010, at 11:37 AM, Oleg Sivokon wrote: > > Guy Morton. > > I've said that before, he is not wrong, he's just serving the facts in a way > that will most likely give you a wrong impression. > He never says that h.264 codec is proprietary, but after reading what he says > you may think it is.
I disagree with your reading of his post. He says nothing to indicate that h.264 is even SLIGHTLY proprietary. > It may also create a wrong impression, when he says that flash had recently > learned to play those videos using h/w rendering. The technology was released > about 6 years ago, but if you compare that to dinosaurs, than it may in fact > sound like very recently :) Well, if you know the context, then it doesn't > look that bad, but the less savvy people will understand it very differently. He is pretty clearly speaking from the point of view of Flash's support of Apple's platforms. > Oh, one more thing regarding the openness of the platform. On my Linux > installation I have HaXe and SWFTools compilers, GNash player (I have Adobe's > player too, but I'm testing against both players) and I do the coding in AXDT > and VIM with AS language coloring - none of these tools has anything to do > with Adobe, and all of them are OSS of different kinds. So, his statement > about flash being proprietary is not correct, however, you may put many > different meanings in that word, so, it may happen that some of those > meanings would not be false... No, they're not. Flash is a proprietary *technology*. Only Adobe can say where it's heading, and how. There are open-source *tools* for making it, that's all. > He also doesn't mention that what and how Apple had implemented in HTML5 is > not a standard, because HTML5 isn't a standard. It is about to became > standard in 2 years from now. You may call that "pushing technology forward", > but, then you would have to agree to call ActiveX a standard and a technology > break-through... > Is that called "baked facts" in proper English? :) If you've been around long enough to know how these things work you will see that they usually get a groundswell of support for elements of the proposal being built into browsers and used long before the w3c completes it's work. However, knowing what is proposed for the standard certainly helps to get all browsers aligned in terms of behaviour and capabilities, and the groundswell of support for various things is usually pretty obvious and reflects the demand for those features from developers and users. ActiveX was always a bad idea as it could never be ported to platforms other than Windows. The web is about interoperability, something it took MS a long time to figure out. Guy > >