Re: [backstage] 3D?
Trainspotters are the only ones who think like this these days :-) Big Brother will never lose it's opening credits ... whatever the content... It's very very rare that the 10 o'clock news ever has... A book will always have a cover (smoke?)... And a dissertation will always have an abstract(mirror?) Like it or lump it - people want tastes to have flavours not just ingredients... we need great chefs to enliven our experiences and if we're going to get them - we need educated consumers... - Original Message - From: J.P.Knight [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2005 9:13 AM Subject: Re: [backstage] 3D? On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Tim Scollick wrote: Big sites with lots of content will continue to use html but the marketing dollars will continue to gravitate to Flash. Which to my mind is a real plus point for Flash. By not installing the flash plugin all the stupid cartoons and marketing drivel disappears from the web and you're left with the content. Which in the case of some overly marketing driven sites can be, er, somewhat limited and often indicates a company trying to use smoke and mirrors to cover up crappy products and/or poor customer service. I therefore tend to think of Flash as a wheat-from-chaff separator. :-) YMMV, Jim'll - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] 3D?
Tim Scollick wrote: Dell, Coke, Nike, Microsoft, GM, Ford, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Adidas... Indeed. We do VW - www.newgolfgti.co.uk being the latest. Try doing that in HTML. No, I'm not a Flash developer, but I am appreciative of what it can do and when it should be deployed. Flash can't do plenty of seemingly obvious things; which is why it should only be used where it makes a proper impact and delivers the needed experience. Much like, er, any technology really. C. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] 3D?
On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 04:30:05PM +0100, Richard Lockwood wrote: My point however that what you and J.P. describe as chaff is neccessary for the evolution and development of the web still holds. Someone has to pay for all this wonderful free content - if you can come up with a better globally applicable model for it than advertising or paid content then all power to you. You seem to be confusing two completely orthoganal points here. I haven't seen anyone (here) say that there shouldn't be paid content or advertising on the web. People are just complaining about the overuse of Flash on web sites. A lot of the annoying Flash that I see has nothing to do with advertising. Yes, granted, there's a lot of irritating stuff being produced in Flash and other advertising media - but there's been an awful lot of rubbish produced in the name of content too, both in print and on the web. But no-one would wish to ban the written word. The delivery method is not the culprit, the lack of creativity is. Sure. But the difference is that I can skim-read some plain HTML and decide that it's crap in a lot less time than it takes to download and watch a crap Flash animation. It wastes a lot less of my time. Would you throw your TV set away simply because you didn't enjoy some of the programmes? No, but I might avoid channels that constantly used advertising techniques that annoyed me (like DOGs or constant crazy frog adverts). I thought people like you had gone off to smash mill machinery in about 1812. No. We've spent the last ten years building the world wide web for people like you to crap all over :) Dave... -- Let me see you make decisions / Without your television pgpGpRwQ5GquD.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [backstage] 3D?
Richard Lockwood wrote: Sorry Stefan, but I've read a lot of Neilsen over the years, and he still manages to frequently annoy me. Neilsen's alertbox and so on make interesting reading occasionally, but his updates rarely marry nicely with anything in the real world. The key of course, like anything claiming authoratitive stature in such a subjective environment is to digest and cherry pick. If you take what he says at face value, every single man, woman and child on the planet is a soulless automaton, void of imagination or the capacity to learn, and only seeking instant content gratification with little regard for new experiences (in one click). Which is fine; because if you use his stuff as a gentle guideline, you can often stop UI designers others making the most fundamental mistake as they pursue the next AJAX dream. I know at least one person who glorifies the e-ground on which Jacob et al tread; and he has yet to convince me that putting everything in plain text, 80 characters wide, is a good idea for anything but BBS. How retro. Its like trying to apply DDA level 3 to everything you do; it simply isn't going to happen, so we nod in the direction of those who evangelise such things in often truly Puritannical style, and move on. My point however that what you and J.P. describe as chaff is neccessary for the evolution and development of the web still holds. Someone has to pay for all this wonderful free content - if you can come up with a better globally applicable model for it than advertising or paid content then all power to you. Two words: Google Micropayment :) You hit the nail on the head of course; advertising is the vehicle on the back of which people initially start making money to fund their site(s). I'd like to see the Firefox extension that gets round that, when it arrives. C. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] 3D?
Well i am web technology journalist Oh! Now it's all starting to make sense. This does conflict with DRM quite heavily in that its impossible to hide your data sources . I didn't say anything about DRM. You're right. It can always be hacked. Advertisers like to *give* video and audio away because it makes you buy their products. AJAX is more than just HTML and Javascript , its whole different design pattern . No, it's not. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML for web development. That sounds like (x)html and javascript to me. It's definitely not a design pattern. Factory, Decorator and Model View Controller are design patterns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_%28computer_science%29). AJAX is a collection of technologies that someone gave a fancy acronym to. You should try it , its great fun . I did try it and I like it, for certain things. In fact, I really like it for data. Although, when I tried it the first time it was called XMLHttpRequest. That was years before someone gave it a fancy name; way below the radar of the media. sounds like quite a grim future to me , i'd prefer a more positive one where developers and system designers realise their responsibily in shaping the internet around open standards , just like the people before them did. The internet without standards would be horrific . Find me an audio and video format that more than 90% of the people can see and I'll use it. Until then, Flash is my only choice. I've used SVG and it's fabulous, if you control the environment it's rolled out in and you can get everyone to download the (proprietary) Adobe plug-in. We were very successful rolling it out in a corporate environment. It's a wonderful technology but the plug-in is not anywhere close to being as ubiquitous as Flash. Deerpark is are only hope and it will still take years for the design tools to catch up. People like pretty interfaces. That's a fact. 'a few shortcomings' is a very polite way of describing it , i prefer the phrase 'a complete lack of support' . Straw man. Read this: http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/accessibility/features/flash/faq.html There is definately a special section in hell for people that do those scrolling blocks of text in flash. I agree. However, we call those people clients. Ok , so i'm obviously looking at this from the backend and you seem to be looking from the visual design perspective . Wrong again. Both Flash and AJAX are client side technologies. You are not talking about the back end at all. If you were, you would use words like oracle, sql, servlets, etc. Sorry if you trolled by this, but I can't stand this type of ignorance. Like SVG and AJAX, Flash is great for certain things and bad for others. But I can't stand the blanket statements that all Flash is bad. Sorry for the rant. On 8/10/05, Amias Channer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:44:01 -0400 Tim Scollick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think that your non-Flash rant is biased and uninformed. Well i am web technology journalist so i suppose thats my mission ;-) Why is it always Flash vs. HTML? Flash can supplement HTML and vice versa. They are good at different things. Because thats how the decision is made in my experience : client: we want to do this with our site , can we do it and what are the options ? me: Yes , probably , that looks like a either an AJAX or Flash job because of . I know that is technically possible to share a datasource between a flash interface and an HTML one . The problem is that it is rare that people put the effort into developing alternative methods to display that data that they do into the flash site. Especially given the expense of developing flash applications. The Medium is the Message. The medium is the medium , the message is the content . For me good web design is about making the right choice where to seperate content from delivery and presentation . Flash has never been good at that . What gets me is that it doesn't degrade , at all . you don't have the plugin or even the latest version of the plugin you don't get the site . That's what JavaScript detection is for. Thats not gracefull degredation , thats making 2 websites. Ever tried navigating a flash site with speech reader , braille pad , set-top-box browser , text mode only or mobile phone ? This area admittedly has a few shortcomings, but Flash has support for Section 508, plug-ins for set top boxes and mobile phones. If you're doing text heavy sites in Flash, you've got bigger problems. 'a few shortcomings' is a very polite way of describing it , i prefer the phrase 'a complete lack of support' . There is definately a special section in hell for people that do those scrolling blocks of text in flash. Flash isn't for everything. Obviously, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay will use html. But trying doing
Re: [backstage] 3D?
Brit wrote: We do VW - www.newgolfgti.co.uk being the latest. Try doing that in HTML. I don't have a problem with Flash if used appropriately [1], but I do have a problem with my Flash-disabled browser being redirected to the experienceFlashYes.html page (which is then a plain black page, not even a message about needing Flash or anything), and the experienceFlashNo.html page (visited out of curiosity) returning a 404... Plus I wouldn't /want/ to do that in HTML. if I wanted to know about the new Golf GTi, I'd rather just have a site giving me the information on its power, handling, drive, and looks, rather than having to wait for ages (and I have broadband!) watching a pointless animation before being able to read one tiny bit of the info. Maybe that's just me. ATB, Matthew [1] Defined as homestarrunner.com - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] 3D?
or alternatively http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/--- although most of it would be a piece of pie to do in dHTML ;) On 8/12/05, Matthew Somerville [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ATB,Matthew[1] Defined as homestarrunner.com-
Re: [backstage] 3D?
On Sat, 23 Jul 2005 03:15:53 -0400 Don Holeman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This page did not work in Firefox, though it did in IE. Client side scripting has a lot of drawbacks, browser dependency is only one of them. Flexibility and security are big issues too. I'm agreed that flash is the best option for 3d and animation generally though it's got a steep cost in both monitary terms and the learning curve. More generally, though, I wonder if we could be seeing the beginning of the demise of the browser as we know it? Right now the paradigm of browser plugins is the dominant mechanism for extending presentation, but there's no reason to think this will always be the case. I don't mean to rant but : The continued rise of AJAX would seem to suggest that the browser is still going strong , at least to me anyway. Client side scripting has come on leaps and bounds since the dark old days of DHTML . There are several APIs for doing cross browser AJAX some of which feature drawing apis which will get you close to the flash look . It will undoubtably be harder than flash and not as slick. For me Flash is an unacceptable compromise in any website , sure it looks lovely and i don't deny for a second that some amazing things have been done with it. What gets me is that it doesn't degrade , at all . you don't have the plugin or even the latest version of the plugin you don't get the site . The success of the web for me is in its use of open standards , flash is going the wrong my IMHO. Ever tried navigating a flash site with speech reader , braille pad , set-top-box browser , text mode only or mobile phone ? I don't think plugins have been as important as you think , take google for example there flagship sites use no plugins at all and are some of the best and , most crucially , the busiest on the web. Amazon , yahoo and ebay are the same , simple standards compliant sites with good content. If you don't want to conquer the web then use flash but otherwise stick with the standards and help make them better. Toodle-pip Amias - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] 3D?
The continued rise of AJAX would seem to suggest that the browser is still going strong , at least to me anyway. Client side scripting has come on leaps and bounds since the dark old days of DHTML . There are several APIs for doing cross browser AJAX some of which feature drawing apis which will get you close to the flash look . It will undoubtedly be harder than flash and not as slick. No doubt that the browser is currently the dominant mechanism for, well, web browsing. Whether this will continue to be the case into the foreseeable future was my question, put another way. Already the need exists to go outside the provisions of browser protocols to access multimedia content. Admittedly, extensions (or plugins) are included in the protocols to accommodate multimedia but there are plenty of non-browser technologies in use as well - chat clients, skype, newsreaders and the like. For me Flash is an unacceptable compromise in any website snip What gets me is that it doesn't degrade , at all . you don't have the plugin or even the latest version of the plugin you don't get the site . Yet according to Macromedia's own (biased?) statistics Flash has a greater dominance on the web than any single brand of browser: Browser stats put the top two brands combined at 94% total compared to Flash at 98%: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Flash stats: http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/tech_breakdown. html I'm not advocating the use of Flash here, just pointing out that already it's usual to go outside the base browser technology to deliver content that's more complex than text and still images. The success of the web for me is in its use of open standards , flash is going the wrong my IMHO. Ever tried navigating a flash site with speech reader , braille pad , set-top-box browser , text mode only or mobile phone ? Usability issues abound, certainly, but open standards are only as good as the tools available to work with them. Take your speech reader example, for example. I'd love to be able to test my sites for use on a speech reader but there are no open source speech readers around (afaik) and the commercial varieties are pricey. You've got a point with mobile as far as text based content goes, but what about feeding mobile devices with audio/video content? Here again we're looking at extensions with the browser protocols acting as middleware. I don't think plugins have been as important as you think , take google for example there flagship sites use no plugins at all and are some of the best and , most crucially , the busiest on the web. Sure, but only for highly specialized applications and with very large amounts of money invested on the server side to gather, process, store, format, and present the output content. Amazon , yahoo and ebay are the same , simple standards compliant sites with good content. To an extent standardization is responsible for their success, and also for the success of Flash. Relational database underpins these sites on the server side, a technology that's ubiquitous on hosting services. And that's the other side of Flash's success story as well, that open source Flash servers are available that allow hosting companies to support it inexpensively. So, I'll buy the argument that standardization is the key, but... If you don't want to conquer the web then use flash but otherwise stick with the standards and help make them better. As desirable as this may be, is the world evolving faster than any standard? Let's generalize beyond Flash, and think beyond the browser too, and beyond the religions of operating systems (open source v. Wintel etc). Is a browser even necessary? What would it take to cut the browser out of the picture entirely? (and to the inevitable response of 'why would you want to do that' I hold that it's a process that's already underway and that the Beeb will need to adapt.) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Amias Channer Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 9:01 AM To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] 3D? snip - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] 3D?
www.htmlguru.com is your friend here. Specifically, http://www.htmlguru.com/content/webpages/guru/guru.html Very elderly site, but still very nice looking. (Although given that it's (c) 1998, don't expect it to work in Firefox / Mozilla based browsers.) However, if you want to work with 3d on the client side, Flash is still your best bet. I know you say you don't want to have to work with plugins, but it's installed on (something like) 98.7% of machines. Cheers, Rich. On 7/22/05, Davy Mitchell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey People,Has anyone seen any good 3D scenes done in CSS/DHTML?I'm thinking up a news visualisation (with a very abstract/arty direction) trying to use client side technologies but no plugins andminimum image files (if any).I am very sleepy. Sorry if this doesn't make sense.Thanks Bye.Davy Mitchell http://www.latedecember.com-Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group.To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
[backstage] 3D?
Hey People, Has anyone seen any good 3D scenes done in CSS/DHTML? I'm thinking up a news visualisation (with a very abstract/arty direction) trying to use client side technologies but no plugins and minimum image files (if any). I am very sleepy. Sorry if this doesn't make sense. Thanks Bye. Davy Mitchell http://www.latedecember.com - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html.
