There’ve been some people bitching about the free_culture presentation being in Flash. As if simply by it’s format it’s somehow ickier or inferior. Now I’ve bitched about the difficulties of putting the thing together because of the technical weaknesses that Flash still has, both in its tools and design, however what gets me is these people that are dogmatic about it.
“You should use SVG. Sure you couldn’t actually do it since the tools and players aren’t there, but you should have done it anyways because it’s better.”
Or even better yet, you should spend your time contributing to that project instead of actually doing what you need to get done
. (Obviously you should do this because the person posting this is much too busy and has more important things to attend to… like bitching on other message forums no doubt.
Now, it’d be nice if there were some alternatives to Flash, if only for competition’s sake, but while SVG has some neat potential, it’s nowhere near prime time. From a purely format/technical perspective SVG is better than SWF in almost ever single perspective (see: Comparing .SWF (Shockwave Flash) and .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format specifications), but from the viewpoint of actually getting anything done (not to mention seen)? Forget about it
And what about SMIL? I don’t know, you tell me? What about SMIL?
In any case, the source files are online. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.