It hardly seems necessary...

[mdlbear]

... to point out that the fact that Macromedia is merging with Adobe will put two of the three greatest villains of the Web (the third should be obvious; it makes a popular but inferior, insecure, and highly nonstandard browser) under one roof.

While it's true that they might succeed in setting the causes of interoperability, accessibility, and generic markup back another decade or two, I prefer to think of the merger as presenting a single large target rather than two smaller ones.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure...

I was talking to some folk from Adobe this evening at a BOF here at CodeCamp, and they were strongly talking up the W3C work on CDF and SVG-t.

Let's give them a chance.

[mdlbear]

One of the problems with both PDF and SVG is that there are ways to embed programs in them, to either turn them into animations, or make them interactive. PDF has the additional problem of being designed originally as a page description format; this makes it particularly easy to make documents that shouldn't be viewed on the screen.

I really prefer the kind of generic markup that HTML provides (at least potentially), that lets my browser lay the page out according to my preferences, not what the author thought would look cool.

I realize that I'm atypical in this respect.

[ashi.livejournal.com]

I agree for the most part. I do find amusement in some of the "cool stuff" type things you can do with Flash and others, but I hate the idea of websites with "requirements," the worst of which are those that require a certain browser.