1. It's not our job to enforce open standards on the internet.Yes, it's not our job to answer questions or provide interesting posts or new music either.
2. Banning Silverlight/Flash/other proprietary links will not make developers change their ways, and will only have the effect of making us miss out on potentially interesting content.I don't think anyone is actually suggesting banning it. A good tongue lashing seems to be sufficient.
3. Porting a piece of software from Windows to Linux is hardly trivial, especially when you're not familiar with Linux.In most cases an app written in Silverlight is not substantially harder to craft than one in Flash or JavaFX or even AJAX, they're just different skillsets. No porting involved.
Furthermore, not everybody writes software in portable languages. A lot of amazing indie games (featured many times previously) have been designed using Windows-only Game Maker. Should we ban those too?If there were a roughly equivalent platform that they could have chosen, perhaps. Virtually all 'game' posts I recall seeing have been Flash based; I'd argue that a developer was penalizing themselves by forcing a download/install unless the content is compelling enough to warrant it. A post exploring the landscape of the game-maker market would probably be interesting.
4. This would be an issue if most people were using Linux, but that's really not the case. Windows is the dominant OS.Yet the site itself seems to render fine in Chrome on Linux. Perhaps market dominance isn't all there is to this discussion after all?
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I
also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I
send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.Yes, it's not our job to answer questions or provide interesting posts or new music either.No, that is our job. That's the point of metafilter! The point of metafilter is not to promote web standards.
I don't think anyone is actually suggesting banning it. A good tongue lashing seems to be sufficient.A 150 comment MeTa thread for every Silverlight post seems excessive, not to mention probably hard on the mods.
In most cases an app written in Silverlight is not substantially harder to craft than one in Flash or JavaFX or even AJAX, they're just different skillsets. No porting involved.This is a choice the developer makes, not the poster. You surely don't expect the Mefite to pay the developer to port the app before making the FPP do you? Because otherwise this point is moot. The awesome game or app is in whatever technology it's in, be it C with windows-only libraries, Cocoa, shitty HTML, etc. I don't think the percentage of the site that uses platform X should have to miss out on awesome stuff for it, just because you don't, or I don't.
If there were a roughly equivalent platform that they could have chosen, perhaps. Virtually all 'game' posts I recall seeing have been Flash based; I'd argue that a developer was penalizing themselves by forcing a download/install unless the content is compelling enough to warrant it. A post exploring the landscape of the game-maker market would probably be interesting.Again, the goal of Mefi is to find awesome stuff, not to promote cross-platform development. If that's what you want to do, GYOB.
I don't. The web without Flash would be a joy and a delight. Everyone you know, everyone I know, everyone who's been on the internet in the last ten years has had the common experience of waiting pointlessly and stupidly for a Youtube video to load. Do you really blame Youtube for the failure that has held video on the web back in the 2002-2003 era? You ought to blame Flash, which, for the sake of "proprietary barriers," introduces reams and reams of artificial cruft. Pointless.The web without Flash would not have things like youtube, grooveshark, good image uploaders, and flash games. I'm talking about the internet that's possible today. I look forward to an internet without flash, and I think we'll be there in a couple years, but it is mistaken to think that flash didn't play an important role in getting us to where we are now.
Flash taught me how to program, I mean, really program rather than just install a wordpress pluginWhere do you get off telling someone they don't know how to program? Is programming a game in javascript not programming in your world? Who made you Arbiter of Programming? Javascript is a powerful functional language with lambdas, anonymous functions, a rich object model, a powerful serialization method, closures, and on and on.
Trust me, you don't know how to program then. At most you know some scripting, and your remark about javascript confirms that. That's fine for the stuff you create, so please don't see this as an attack on you, it isn't. And if you manage to make money with it as well, good for you!
The point he was trying to make (poorly), is, if you use a proprietary "language" like .NET or ActionScript you are just playing with tinker toys. It's like playing with capsella and thinking "I AM A REAL ENGINEER NAO".Are you kidding me? ActionScript is based on the open standard for ECMAScript, which is what javascript is also based on. Javascript has absolutely nothing to do with Java. If you don't think javascript is a "real" programming language, I'm sorry but you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Javascript is an extraordinarily powerful, expressive programming language. Capsela is a toy (an awesome toy). Javascript is a real language used in real programming environments by people who want to get things done. What do you think the user-interface for GMail is written in -- it's sure as hell not C++, it's javascript. I'm sorry, but at the point that entire applications are written in a language, that language is good and well a "real" language, whatever that means.
Who made him the arbiter of programming? Are you kidding? Noone is interested in kids redefining what programming means. Now I agree, you *can* program using JavaScript.. the ability is there. But just because you can use a subset of a language doesn't make you a programmer. So I agree with you on that note.
Many of us are saying exactly that. We're not interested in the "part of the web" made up by people who don't care about standards.That's fine, and perfectly valid. Meanwhile, some of us are doing work for clients, and our clients customers use IE6. I don't like it, but it pays me a good salary, and it isn't that hard, so I'll do it until I don't have to.
To a degree; but you know as well as I do that javascript is capable of most of those things, and can easily be extended to cover all of them. Hell, that's pretty much all Flash is.This is more true now than ever, but some of these things are still hard to make work in all browsers. If Flash was just javascript, it would never have taken off. Flash is javascript, plus trusted access to the local machine, plus a powerful set of libraries.
Your post is stupid.
posted by cellphone at 11:37 AM on November 30, 2009 [7 favorites]