Talk:Adobe Flash

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Revision as of 07:21, 24 November 2008 by imported>Caesar Schinas (Talk:Flash moved to Talk:Adobe Flash: Moved to Adobe Flash for consistency. (See eg Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Windows, etc.) Hope this works...! Will redirect Flash to Adobe Flash for now, though disambiguation page may one day be wanted.)
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 Definition:  Extremely popular multimedia authoring and playback system from Adobe, where flash formats are used for most of the animated ads and video clips on today's Web sites. [d] [e]
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 Workgroup category:  Computers [Categories OK]
 Talk Archive:  none  English language variant:  American English

First, I like this...

Some of the terminology in the introduction, such as vector graphics and client, may be slightly more technical than a non-CS reader will grasp. Alternatively, keep them, but have at least stub explanations where I put links. Do some searching first -- there may already be some articles but without quite having those names.

I know you have a section on competitors, but the relationship of Flash to other products and open components is really important, and deserves a little discussion in the introduction. Please understand I'm not an expert on webpage development; I can do some straight HTML and cautiously bring in a few other things.

Nevertheless, it clearly has competitors for animation. It seems to be very storage-efficient; I've seen the same content be smaller in a Flash than a PDF file --not sure if those are special cases.

You mention scripting languages, but that's a blurry area, with many languages of many levels of power. PHP and CSS sometimes are put there, although that's a bit dubious. When I hear "scripting language", I tend to think of Perl, Python, etc., which aren't as web-oriented (client side) as JavaScript. Either in this article, or perhaps in a separate overview, showing how the pieces relate would be useful. If you just want to focus on presentation and animation, perhaps "scripting language" is too broad a term.

Very interesting so far and I look forward to more. Howard C. Berkowitz 13:01, 30 July 2008 (CDT)

Thank you very much for your suggestions! I'm adding a section on the relationship of Flash to other products, and making more stub explinations and links. Ganggang Hu 18:27, 3 Aug 2008 (CDT)

Reasons for use of Flash

I don't like to just strip this much straight out without discussion, but as a web developer I take issue with the following excerpt :

The main reasons of people using Flash are as follows:
* Flash files load fast and save on download time because Flash is vector based whereas HTML is not.
* Flash intelligently "caches" it’s movies so they don’t have to be reloaded.
* Flash tools are easy to use.
* Compared to other plug-ins such as Java, Acrobat Reader, QuickTime or Windows Media Player, the Flash Player has a small install size, quick download time, and fast initialization time.

In the same order as the above bullet points :

  • Huh? HTML is not an animated graphics / video format. Furthermore, you could well say that HTML is vector-based, insofar as that the web browser reads the markup and paints on the screen - apart from text you have element borders, outlines, backgrounds, etc, which are essentially vectors (with the exception of raster format background-images, of course). I'm not sure how to rewrite this statement in such a way as that it means anything...
  • Ok, fine.
  • That's just a matter of opinion. They certainly take some learning. And are other competing technologies harder to use?
  • I've never studied the plugin sizes, so won't comment on that, but it's whether people have it installed that matters to the webdev rather than how long it took them to download it when they originally did install it. And the fact that a lot of people have it installed should be on this bulleted list, too. (It is mentioned elsewhere on the page at length.)

Shall I go ahead and rewrite this section? --Caesar Schinas 00:30, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Probably yes, since the original authors have not been active for a while. --Daniel Mietchen 00:40, 24 November 2008 (UTC)
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