Slight change in the web site for FAQ
cwdjrxyz
made one change on the entry page that you might wish to check. At the
bottom of the page I have added a slide show of all of the wines and
glasses that are used for the random image you see at the top of the
page. It has a background music drinking song recorded in 1906 by a
very famous singer. See if you can guess who she is. The show will not
start downloading unless the large start button is clicked so that it
will not slow the site down for those with a slow connection. I made
the recording using the FLV/SWF format which is now the leading video
format on the web. Many large sites have replaced Windows, Real, and
QT formats with it because it will play on most modern computers and
has many other advantages. Videos on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, YouTube, etc
now usually are in this format. Although I marked it as low broadband
so those with very slow connections will not click it if they are in a
hurry, it likely will play even on dialup, but instead of starting to
stream nearly at once it might have to buffer up to a few minutes
before it starts playing. There is a dark download progress bar that
will give you an idea of how much has been downloaded. That 1906
recording took a lot of processing to sound half way decent. With such
old recordings there is only so much you can do.
In case regular users of the faqs site do not want to go through the
front door, just bookmark the page you get after clicking "Enter" and
in the future you can skip the entry page you have viewed before.
Jose
> Many
> large sites have replaced Windows, Real, and QT formats with it because
> it will play on most modern computers and has many other advantages.
> Videos on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, YouTube, etc now usually are in this
> format.
The flash format is an abomination, a security hazard, an advertiser's
dream, and a web surfer's nightmare. Flash keeps its own (pretty much
secret) cookie stash of where you visit, does not respect portable
standards, has no "off switch" in the browser (and never will because it
is primarily supported by advertisers who use flash to force animation on
web browsers that otherwise have it turned off), and should not be used
except in special cases (of which this is not one). It should absolutely
never be used on the opening page of a site.
All IMHO of course, but please reconsider! There are -much- better ways
of accomplishing most of what flash does (for example, animated .gif for
a slide show)
Jose
Emery Davis
I usually steer clear of the web design arguments, because I admittedly don't
know much about it and out of respect for the considerable service cwdjr does
our community by hosting and maintaining the FAQ.
But I am moved to agree with Jose on this one. I really hate flash.
I go to considerable lengths to manage my cookie privacy on the machines I use
for browsing. But as Jose states flash is having none of it, letting the doubleclicks
(and worse) of the world exchange information via my hard disk.
Further the spirit of usenet comes from a text only, academic and multi-platform
background. It seems contrary to this spirit to publish our FAQ in a format that
precludes for example this excellent SGI/IRIX computer I am now posting from,
or even the perfectly modern 64bit Linux machine I often use. (These machines
have notable advantages, in that they never break down or crash. I usually use
a Mac for web stuff, but this lost its disk a couple of days ago. What a pain...
Windows is of course precluded because of security issues; I don't like buying
a car and then paying some other company (yearly) for seat belts.)
On a final note music at websites drives me crazy, because if I'm surfing
late at night it has an annoying tendency to wake my children, who stagger
in with a "what are you looking at, Daddy?"
All this said, again, my thanks and considerations to cwdjr, for all his efforts.
BTW, are you a fan of Calvados? I noticed you're collecting various "gouté", if
you want I'd be happy to mail you a bottle of some very fine AOC Domfrontais.
Email separately.
-E
--
Emery Davis
You can reply to ibmemer...@ebayadelkadell.applecom
by removing the well known companies
cwdjrxyz
Like it or not the new FLV/SWF is here to stay and has now run most
other formats into the background for online videos. It now can give
outstanding full video quality in contrast to the old swf, and it can
be used for even long movies. The swf file you see is now only a small
container file that contains the player controls, logos etc. The
actual video is a .flv(flash video) file that contains the video, and
both files are encoded at the same time and stored on the server. You
only see the .swf file if you view the source code. The .swf and .flv
files are linked so that when the .swf file is started, it internally
starts downloading the .swf file to the temporary cache of the
browser. Flash may not have an off switch in some browsers, and some
ad users can abuse it by auto starting etc, but one is easily added to
a good modern browser such as current Firefox. From their screen you
can download a plugin in a very short time that will put a button on
the screen everytime there is a flash video. If you want the video,
you click the button, if not the flash video does not appear. Replace
flash with an animated gif? You must be joking. An animated gif (do
people really still use these) does not include sound in sync and
allows only very crude motion, not full movie quality if desired.
Anything can be a security issue, but it usually is solved quickly by
those who supply anti-virus and malware programs. Likely the most
numerous security issues over the years have resulted from ActiveX
exploits on IE browsers. I find your concerns without serious current
merit, and apparently so do the officials of many private and public
organizations including most of the major news organizations in the
US. I am not going to reconsider. You have a right to your opinion,
but I think it is based on an outdated knowledge of current FLV/SWF. I
have been using the new FLV/SWF video most often in recent years on my
2 private domains with good results. However I am perfectly able to
encode and use dozens of audio and video formats. For some examples,
see http://www.cwdjr.net/video4/embedpageB.php which is an
experimental media demo page of mine. Some of the media there are of
very high quality and require a high broadband connection. Other
media, especially some of the audio, will even work on dialup. The
page is valid xhtml 1.1 and served correctly as such with server
conversion of code to html 4.01 strict for outmoded browsers, such as
all IE ones through IE7, that can not view proper W3C xhtml standards
code when the xhtml is served properly as application/xhtml+xml.
In short the FLV/SWF comes on only if you click the start button, so
you do not have to view it. You do not even have to view the entry
page that contains it as I explained earlier. It does not force
anything on you. I absolutely will not take it down, and would take
the whole website down before I would do that. This subject is closed.