{"id":44,"date":"2007-01-27T22:12:21","date_gmt":"2007-01-27T21:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/27\/flash-dont-click-here-to-download-plugin\/"},"modified":"2008-02-04T12:18:31","modified_gmt":"2008-02-04T10:18:31","slug":"flash-dont-click-here-to-download-plugin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/2007\/01\/27\/flash-dont-click-here-to-download-plugin\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash: (don&#8217;t) click here to download plugin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"twitter-share\"><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?via=pbeyssac\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/noflash.png\" title=\"The dreaded \u201cDownload plugin\u201d icon\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/noflash.png\" alt=\"The dreaded \u201cDownload plugin\u201d icon\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s above the cute, user-friendly icon I get when visiting web sites such as <a href=\"http:\/\/video.google.com\/\">Google Video<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/youtube.com\/\">Youtube<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymotion.com\/\">Dailymotion<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/analytics\/\">Google Analytics<\/a>&#8230; and countless others, including <em>all<\/em> blog posts with an embedded video. Needless to say, clicking on the icon doesn&#8217;t yield anything other than a &#8220;<em>sorry, your operating system is not supported<\/em>&#8221; message.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--> Contrary to popular belief, Adobe Flash:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>is neither open nor standard, meaning its technical specification is not public;<\/li>\n<li>is a complex format, meaning it&#8217;s not easy to write compatible implementations (clones) &#8212; currently there are none; the above point makes that extremely unlikely to happen in the near future;<\/li>\n<li>is not portable, meaning its use is limited to Adobe-approved operating systems: Windows, MacOS, Solaris and Linux (and the Linux plugin itself is quite outdated). No <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freebsd.org\/\">FreeBSD<\/a>, no <a href=\"http:\/\/www.netbsd.org\/\">NetBSD<\/a>, no <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openbsd.org\/\">OpenBSD<\/a>&#8230; the Flash license even explicitly forbids its use on non-Adobe-approved operating systems, excluding any kind of emulation as a stopgap measure;<\/li>\n<li>requires a plugin;<\/li>\n<li>is not the web, not even web 2.0.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Don&#8217;t think this is all obvious for everyone: I was recently amazed to read in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.magazinevideo.com\/presse-cvm.php\">French amateur video magazine<\/a>, who should know better, that Flash requires no plugin and runs on any computer, any operating system. This is so blatantly wrong that I wrote them and they mostly replied that it&#8217;s <em>almost<\/em> true, at least enough for their readers purposes (!); exactly the same kind of argument we heard years ago about Internet-Explorer-only websites.<\/p>\n<p>This means that the current situation with the Flash format is even worse than the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rfc1149.net\/documents\/whynotword\">situation with the Word formats<\/a>, which are currently more or less supported by open source software such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openoffice.org\/\">Openoffice<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Next time you upload a nice video to Youtube or send it to your friends&#8230; or next time you add cool-looking animations to your web site using Flash&#8230; try to have all of this in mind: a lot of people just can&#8217;t use Flash. So unless you add some provision for Flash-less users (such as Google Video allowing you to download the video in its original, non-Flash, easily playable format), your site will just be unusable for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s above the cute, user-friendly icon I get when visiting web sites such as Google Video, Youtube, Dailymotion, Google Analytics&#8230; and countless others, including all blog posts with an embedded video. Needless to say, clicking on the icon doesn&#8217;t yield anything other than a &#8220;sorry, your operating system is not supported&#8221; message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signal.eu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}