Flame-free, bash-free debate on the purpose of Wrapper

[eddit]

Gentlemen, I would like to start a thread on the purpose of this
project. What are the benefits because I have a laundry list of
drawbacks. No flaming, no bashing just an honest debate.

[Tyler Larson]

I'm fine with this, lets hear what you have to say.

[eddit]

Ok so I understand the desire to circumvent a browser's rendering
engine to ensure 100% consistency across the board when it comes to
the VISUAL representation of a webpage. The glaring issue though, is
that by doing so you create inconsistency across the browsers because
of the way that each of them treat the medium you are using to achieve
your original goal; flash content.

You also loose so much basic functionality, but I'll just take one
from the list and see where we go from there:

You cant "Find" (CTRL+F) something in flash content. Without this the
entire project is doomed.

[Tyler Larson]

This project doesn't currently include any components, the thought is
that you can choose the components that you like and modify how the
markup is parsed to support the features that you need such as drop
downs, radio buttons or maybe standard flash things that are not in
html like sliders or carousels. The reason why this was originally
done is because components in flash as drastically different from one
set to another, in terms of how they act, function, report changes and
listen for related objects to change.

With this in mind creating something that is done on an application
level like creating an alert box or a find window would also get an
amount of disagreement from different ActionScript developers. But in
terms of adding a feature like this it wouldn't be that hard to create
and I would be happy to help you if you need. With a quick google
search I found this, and I have seen a few others just like it. http://www.gamemeal.com/lab/07053000.html
For wrapper you would have to loop through the display list and check
all of the text fields on the page but also pretty simple.

It is true that we are breaking away from the features that the
browser gives for free. More work is involved if you want to replicate
all of these features but it also gives you more flexibility to do
what you would like. This is also an issue with all flash sites and
something that should be fixed but it maters what you are using to the
framework for.

I've always looked at Wrapper as an ActionScript framework would
enable the sites that need to use Flash features to be more accessible
then they normally would while simplifying development by breaking up
the responsibilities between the ActionScript/HTML/CSS developers.

I have been working on some large projects over the last year sense
this first release and I have to say I dont know if I would be able to
create what I have without a setup like this. Using the alternatives
like Flex/ Laszlo/ etc. the problems that you encounter are fare more
complex to get out of because of the amount that these platforms lock
you into their ways of doing things.

I understand that the project isn't perfect and would love more
criticism if you have it, I've been trying to make it better outside
of the open-source version for a while but I think conceptually there
is a lot here and far from something that is purposeless.

I dont know anything about you but if you are one of the anti-flash
people take into account that the Flash player is still hundreds of
times faster than JavaScript and it is the only front-end way to do
many things. The current project that I am working on integrates photo
processing, facial recognition, 3d transformations, simulations of
realistic products, sorts on 10 of thousands of products and so on. I
love many of these other technologies but these types of things are
far out of the range of most of them and flash normally is the answer
usually because of the numbers of how many people have it. And in
terms of things like the Canvas tag, it's interesting but until all of
the browsers start creating features that work more similarly across
platforms it's not an option.

-Tyler

[eddit]

I support the use of flash, in a modular-like fashion. I believe that
flash has many amazing capabilities and certain parts of an html page
can be composed of flash to present data in a way that only flash can
i.e. a 3d rotation of a product placed on a digital mannequin. All of
the point you mentioned about what flash offers over standardized
technologies are absolutely correct, but this isn't about advocating
for flash vs html. This project's is creating a secondary presentation
layer to a web page's stack, re-rending what the browser engine should
handle on it's own. It only happens that the tools you are using to
provide rendering is flash. It could be any other technology and I
would still argue against it.

On Apr 22, 12:42 pm, Tyler Larson <tallty...@mac.com> wrote:
> This project doesn't currently include any components, the thought is  
> that you can choose the components that you like and modify how the  
> markup is parsed to support the features that you need such as drop  
> downs, radio buttons or maybe standard flash things that are not in  
> html like sliders or carousels. The reason why this was originally  
> done is because components in flash as drastically different from one  
> set to another, in terms of how they act, function, report changes and  
> listen for related objects to change.
>
> With this in mind creating something that is done on an application  
> level like creating an alert box or a find window would also get an  
> amount of disagreement from different ActionScript developers. But in  
> terms of adding a feature like this it wouldn't be that hard to create  
> and I would be happy to help you if you need. With a quick google  

> search I found this, and I have seen a few others just like it.http://www.gamemeal.com/lab/07053000.html

[Tyler Larson]

This doesn't sound like an argument against this framework as much as
an argument against full page things. If you dont like for portions of
the page to be controlled with Wrapper then you can confine it to a
portion of the page. Many of the people I have seen use this use a
normal html header and footer. I think this is totally fine and simply
done.

About it being an additional layer, I dont know if this is true, it's
the same layers as are normally used. I would say it is better using
the layers available to it. Keep in mind that it is an ActionScript
framework and anyone using it has already decided that using the Flash
player is ok for there project. The next step is how do we make our
flash project come to life, we could design our layouts in MXML and
compile our project together so that the search engines and screen
readers can't see the source anymore. Most flash sites actually come
up with a custom methods of getting their data in from the server or
use things like AMF to transfer binary back and forth. It makes these
sites content driven but SEO ends up being a extra layer on top of
everything.

SEO in Flash is normally done with things like SWFAddress to allow
deep linking, back button support and if you go to the effort of doing
the server portion of it also replaces the content on the html page so
that search engines see the same content in the html as what your
flash piece is rendering. The thing that very, very few Flash sites
take into account is that search engines rank certain html tags as
more relevant then others, such as h1 tags are more important that h2
and so on. So if to make a good flash site means to make a good html
site why not just base your flash content off of this same html. So
really Wrapper is a framework to automate the creation of well
structured flash sites it just happens to be doing this with the
technologies that are required for the job.

Also I have tried to keep true to the standards so that it is easy to
get up to speed with Wrapper but the very act of it being created in
Flash gives it a few things that are much different then standard
HTML. In flash a displayObject can be any shape and be filled with
anything. This means Wrapper can render a div tag can as a circle,
square or star and be filled as an image or gradient and define it all
defined within css. This kind of difference makes a pages markup much
simpler while still structurally being no different then the
standards. The point I'm trying to make is that it isn't standard HTML
and this framework will never be competing with the other browsers or
anything like that, it is an ActionScript framework that is based off
of the ideas that the web standards laid out to build better Flash
sites.

Thanks for arguing about all of this with me, if you have more I would
be more then happy to talk about it with you.

-Tyler

[in...@vancouveronlinemedia.com]

Tyler's hitting it on the nose with this one. Listen to him people, he
knows what he's talking about! I know, I have over 10 years experience
and make top dollar.

Tyler, quick question... can wrapper render .swf's like it would a jpg?

-Steven

[Tyler Larson]

Thank you for the kind words, and yes you can in an image tag, flash
deals with all of it in the same way.

<img src="yourswf.swf" />

-Tyler

[in...@vancouveronlinemedia.com]

Tyler,

I tried this on my blog and I get Url not found 6 times.

http://stevenstark.com/experiments/2009/04/isometric-map-test-1/

<p><img src="http://e-arcade.ca/flash/fallout_online/Map.swf" alt="Map1" /></p>

any idea?

-Steven

[Tyler Larson]

I'm not sure, it probity has to do with the format of that path, have
you tried in an embed tag? Or also try using paths relative to root
starting with the slash and relative ones without. These issues have
been fixed in the version I am working. I'm trying to get it together
in a releasable format but there is some more work to do first.
-Tyler