Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: An ignorant question?

[Alex Hudson]

On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 10:29:14PM +0100, Paul wrote:
> dHTML offers a lot, but takes even more. Have a look at
> http://www.reelnorth.co.uk and you'll see some neat dHTML. It's useful,
> but not everything supports it.

It's also very basic. The things I was thinking of - particularly in 
relation to online courses - is the amount of multimedia you need to 
include, and the synchronisation you require to make it work. First
problem is that there are no free software plugins for video, as far
as I know - you have to trust in the browser being able to read it
somehow. Ditto audio, really. You also don't have much DOM support for
multimedia - many plugins (like Real) will expose an interface that
allows you to synch audio, for example. 

> The original new version used dHTML extensively for a number of things
> and I ditched them in favour for the CSS approach, but that seems to be
> failing as well.
> 
> Upshot, you're trapped between a rock and a hard place. I'm waiting to
> see how animated SVGs work out. Flash is easy to do, but evil.

This is why Flash is used so extensively - it gives you resolution-
independent output, which is basically ubiquitous and gives you better
guarantees about what things will look like. It gives you real multimedia,
animation and very small file sizes. Sadly, there is no free software
equivilent. I'm hoping that one of the plugins might come good soon, and
that OOo could be used as a Flash designer, but that only puts us into
"catching up with what they have" mode, there is no advance beyond that.
SVG would be technically a good system - integration into modern DOM
standards for a start - but I just don't see other browsers getting
default support for SVG soon (whereas Flash is now bundled, I think?).

Cheers,

Alex.