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> We quietly built the alternative to Flash over the last 10 years. It's called the web. The 'Web' can't play video or audio, the 'Web' needs plug-ins to do so

• acdha 11y ago
  That's like saying “The ‘Web’ can't display images, the ‘Web’ needs plug-ins to do so. Plug-ins like libjpeg or giflib”. Right now, you can put a <video> or <audio> tag on a page and it will work in something like 95% of the browsers in use. That's already better than Flash and going up as IE8 users upgrade to newer versions of IE or install Chrome/Flash. Sure, you can't rely on users not recompiling their browser to disable it but you also can't rely on 100% support for anything on the web – users disable image loading, plugins, stylesheets or JavaScript, install incredibly overzealous ad-blockers, use ISPs which tamper with page contents, etc.
  • geofft 11y ago
    Yup. Remember back when you actually needed helper applications to display certain image types? https://www.as.cmu.edu/application/pref_1.gif https://www.as.cmu.edu/application/pref_1.gif
    • acdha 11y ago
      Or when GIF required a license to implement so people actually had to disable it until the Unisys patents expired. That was fun…