Does Macromedia have their heads up their a***s?

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netdragon
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Does Macromedia have their heads up their a***s?

Post by netdragon »

You still have to manually point its installer to the Plugins directory. I can't believe they still don't know what Mozilla is!
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old momokatte
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Post by old momokatte »

Does everyone have their heads up their asses?

Why the hell is Mozilla still using the EMBED tag? Why hasn't everybody agreed on a logical standard for using the OBJECT tag (source and codebase as a parameters, not attributes)?
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Ashitaka
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Post by Ashitaka »

Macromedia: Yes

Mozilla: No... we needs it for backwards compatibility.
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netdragon
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Post by netdragon »

momokatte wrote:Does everyone have their heads up their asses?

Why the hell is Mozilla still using the EMBED tag? Why hasn't everybody agreed on a logical standard for using the OBJECT tag (source and codebase as a parameters, not attributes)?


Damnit. Mozilla just went screwy and I lost my reply. That's after it went screwy on Windows. What's up?



Well, blame the <object> tag on IE for Window's current engine, but since Tasman will probably replace IE's rendering engine. Tasman is used for MSN and MacIE on OSX.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www ... /0190.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www ... /0027.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www ... /0131.html
http://tantek.com/log/2003/05.html#work20030515t1037

Microsoft responds

Tantek Çelik, chief developer of the standards–compliant Tasman rendering engine, replies to our review:

IE5.1/Mac is all about three things:

1. Performance and stability improvements in the Tasman engine
2. Numerous W3C standards related bug fixes in Tasman
3. Some nifty (though somewhat geeky) user interface improvements

Performance: too much is never enough

While IE5/Mac was known at release for being smaller and faster than both previous versions and rivals, through some clever improvements in the Tasman engine, noticeable advances have been made both in speed and responsiveness of web pages in IE5.1/Mac.
Fidelity: speed is only good if the results are accurate

IE5/Mac broke new ground in W3C standards compliance (CSS1, HTML4, PNG1, ECMA-262, DOM1HTML) for a shipping browser. No other Mac browser yet contains as complete support of these standards as IE5/Mac does. Disagree? Report your standards gripes (er, that should be: well–written, strictly compliant bug reports) to wasp@microsoft.com. Invalid markup and style need not apply.)

IE5.1/Mac continues this steadfast dedication to W3C standards with numerous standards related fixes, mostly minor in nature, but then, when it comes standards, details count.

For example, IE5.1/Mac properly supports nondeterministic matching of CSS2 selectors: child—note the last test: “(this test is harder than the others!);” sibling—note the last test: “(This should be maroon).” Try those pages in your current browser for comparison.


http://www.alistapart.com/stories/macbrowsers/

Tantek shows that even if Microsoft as a whole is a monster, there are still people there who care about things other than taking over the world (like standards) ;-)
Free yourself from the illusion. The heart of a dragon is pure love, honor and truth. The dragon's power is meant to protect the weak and uphold love and honor.
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jmn
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Post by jmn »

netdragon wrote:http://www.alistapart.com/stories/macbrowsers/

Tantek shows that even if Microsoft as a whole is a monster, there are still people there who care about things other than taking over the world (like standards) ;-)


Please note that this story dates from December 2001 and has to a certain extent been eclipsed by Microsoft's decision to limit future versions of Internet Explorer to their own operating system.

It seems odd that Macromedia should be so often slandered by the mozillaZine regulars when it at least is attempting to take an active role in finding a solution to the various plugin problems. Macromedia is in fact hosted the recent W3C meeting about these issues.

W3C Holds Ad Hoc Meeting on Recent Court Decision,
Launches Public Discussion List


W3C invited its Members as well as other key commercial and open
source software interests to attend an ad hoc meeting hosted by
Macromedia on Tuesday 19 August in San Francisco, CA, USA.
Participants discussed Eolas v. Microsoft and US Patent 5,838,906.
W3C has created the <a href="http://public-web-plugins@w3.org">public-web-plugins@w3.org</a> archived public mailing
list for discussion
.

Please refer to the report from Steven R Bratt,
W3C Chief Operating Officer.

http://www.w3.org/2003/08/patent

If the Mozilla Foundation wants to put its own views forward then the best way would be to pay for affiliate membership of the W3C.

I, for one, would be prepared to help with fundraising and contributions to that end. This has been suggested in the Evangelism topic before but like most pertinent and serious issues appears to get very little response.

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jmn
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Post by jmn »

momokatte wrote:Does everyone have their heads up their asses?

Why the hell is Mozilla still using the EMBED tag? Why hasn't everybody agreed on a logical standard for using the OBJECT tag (source and codebase as a parameters, not attributes)?


The simple answer is that the <embed> tag actually works for all non-MSIE Windows browsers including MSIE for Mac. I realise that this is an uncomfortable reality for those who honestly believe that advocacy of web standards is the only way to promote Mozilla to the general public.

Much of the argument has been instigated by the Flash Satay technique by Drew McLellan which has been discussed in depth elsewhere on mozillaZine.

Here is a quote from the author of the Flash Satay technique :

"The technique is experimental, but works pretty well depending on your audience. You do hear the occasional report of failures due to corrupt plugins etc that more traditional techniques don’t expose."

Flash Satay Poll
http://www.allinthehead.com/retro/91/

There is an online poll to check browser support for a simple non-interactive Flash file. Unfortunately this won't highlight some of the real problems in attempting to adapt the Flash Satay technique to Flash applications which are more complex. If you check on Google for "Flash Satay" you will find that it really hasn't been widely accepted for practical use. Drew McLellan has done an admirable job with his research but even he isn't pushing the technique as doctrine.

If the <object> was a workable solution for all plugins then it would simply be accepted by the majority of web developers and plugin manufacturers without argument.

J.M.N.
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willll
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Re: Does Macromedia have their heads up their a***s?

Post by willll »

netdragon wrote:You still have to manually point its installer to the Plugins directory. I can't believe they still don't know what Mozilla is!
How do you want them to find Mozilla? They could just search for the default Mozilla directory (on Window it would be C:\Program files\mozilla.org\Mozilla), but you have already shown that you are against programs expecting files to be in a certain hard-code directory. The could search for the Mozilla executable file, but that would be stupid because it wouldn't find other gecko browsers, it wouldn't work if someone had changed the name of the file, it would find other files that had the same name as mozilla, and it would be incredibly slow. What on earth are you expecting them to do??
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Post by willll »

netdragon wrote:since Tasman will probably replace IE's rendering engine. Tasman is used for MSN and MacIE on OSX.
Not a single one of the links your provide support this statement.
First link wrote:To be clear, the Tasman project is not the same as the MacIE project. MacIE
*uses* Tasman, but Tasman development has been done in a separate division
since shortly after IE5/Mac shipped in March of 2000.

So no, the Tasman project has not been closed, at least, not yet.

Tantek
Yes, this is true, and we have already discussed this in this forum, nobody has denied it. But how on earth you got the idea from this statement that Tasman would be ported to Windows and used in WinIE is beyond all comprehension.
second link wrote:BTW: do you plan to port Tasman engine on other platforms (Windows,
Linux/UNIX'es, PDA's)?
Please note that this is a question (will you port it?) as opposed to a statement (it will be ported). That fact that it was never replied to does not seem to imply an answer of 'yes'.
third link wrote:I've had experience with both cross-platform development (e.g. OpenDoc) and
single platform development (e.g. Tasman v0,v0.1), and my experience, and
the experience of everyone else I know that has done both, was that single
platform development can be done much much faster (not to mention, with
fewer people, which also often means much faster).

How much effort was spent on NS6's cross-platform development, when that
energy could have been put into better standards support instead?

And speed isn't the only issue. Mac users and developers *know* that Mac
first, Mac only, or Mac specific apps are almost always of higher quality,
and provide a superior user experience than "ported" apps.
The writer (developer of Tasman) seems to be saying that he would never port Tasman and it would be crappy if it was ported. This would seem like an argument as to why Tasman would not be ported to Windows. Why you thought this would prove your point is a mystery to me.
fourth link wrote:Microsoft Corp. today announced the broad availability of MSN® services to users of Mac OS X with the premiere of MSN for Mac OS X, the first Internet subscription service from MSN built specifically for consumers using Mac OS X.

MSN for Mac OS X contains a major update of the Tasman rendering engine.

Thanks to a new rendering engine, Web pages load faster.

And while users are primarily interested in speed, this new version of Tasman (evidence of which is broadcast in the user agent string) contains numerous bug fixes, and perhaps even implements a few more CSS features as well.

What fixes? More than I can count or remember. Which features? That I will leave up to the community to discover. Will there be sequels? Is there another? I don't know and I don't know. You'll have to ask the oracle, if you're lucky enough to be contacted by her.
This proves that development of Tasman is continuing, but its future is incertain. Once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with a porting effort to Windows.
fifth link wrote:Microsoft responds

Tantek Çelik, chief developer of the standards–compliant Tasman rendering engine, replies to our review:

IE5.1/Mac is all about three things:

1. Performance and stability improvements in the Tasman engine
2. Numerous W3C standards related bug fixes in Tasman
3. Some nifty (though somewhat geeky) user interface improvements

Performance: too much is never enough

While IE5/Mac was known at release for being smaller and faster than both previous versions and rivals, through some clever improvements in the Tasman engine, noticeable advances have been made both in speed and responsiveness of web pages in IE5.1/Mac.
Fidelity: speed is only good if the results are accurate

IE5/Mac broke new ground in W3C standards compliance (CSS1, HTML4, PNG1, ECMA-262, DOM1HTML) for a shipping browser. No other Mac browser yet contains as complete support of these standards as IE5/Mac does. Disagree? Report your standards gripes (er, that should be: well–written, strictly compliant bug reports) to wasp@microsoft.com. Invalid markup and style need not apply.)

IE5.1/Mac continues this steadfast dedication to W3C standards with numerous standards related fixes, mostly minor in nature, but then, when it comes standards, details count.

For example, IE5.1/Mac properly supports nondeterministic matching of CSS2 selectors: child—note the last test: “(this test is harder than the others!);” sibling—note the last test: “(This should be maroon).” Try those pages in your current browser for comparison.
Article about the development of Tasman that mentions nothing about Windows, that is almost two years old. Absolutely none of these articles contain any evidence that Tasman will be ported to Windows and used in WinIE.
netdragon wrote:Tantek shows that even if Microsoft as a whole is a monster, there are still people there who care about things other than taking over the world (like standards) ;-)
This is true, but once again, how does this make you believe that they will use Tasman on Windows???
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Post by shadytrees »

Don't hate Macromedia. Its Dreamweaver editor is the closest thing to standards in the WYSIWYG market.
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Post by jmn »

hao2lian wrote:Don't hate Macromedia. Its Dreamweaver editor is the closest thing to standards in the WYSIWYG market.


And they deserve a lot of credit for bringing their ActionScript into line with the ECMA-262 specification for JavaScript. With an inbuilt XML parser and support for the creation of components, Flash has moved from eye-candy to serious development tool for internet applications.

Edition 3 Final ECMAScript Language Specification
http://www.mozilla.org/js/language/E262-3.pdf

There still needs to be some serious work done to make their installation program more compatible with Firebird. I didn't have any problems installing their plugins with either Netscape 6/7 or Mozilla.

J.M.N.
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jmn
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Post by jmn »

hao2lian wrote:Don't hate Macromedia. Its Dreamweaver editor is the closest thing to standards in the WYSIWYG market.

Macromedia is also participating in the Web Standards Project. There is a special WaSP Dreamweaver Task Force "to To work with Macromedia’s engineers to improve the standards compliance and accessibility of web pages produced with Macromedia Dreamweaver".

More details on the Web Standards Project website :

Dreamweaver Task Force
http://www.webstandards.org/act/campaign/dwtf/

J.M.N.
London
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