Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: lessig.org site supporting Adobe's proprietary Flash format

[Chris Croughton]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 05:59:04PM +0000, Lee Braiden wrote:

> On Friday 29 February 2008 15:37:28 Chris Croughton wrote:
> > If you want ordinary people to look at what you produce, do it in the
> > format they are most likely to be able to use.  Doing it in some weird
> > new format they've never heard of with the material you want htem to see
> > being in a 'legacy' area will only annoy them.
> 
> Hmm.. I would say fix the root bug, rather than breaking known-good things as 
> a workaround for the bug.  For example, websites should never have been 
> adapted to work with non-compliant browsers like IE.  That works around a 
> bug, instead of fixing the buggy browser.  As a result, we all have to live 
> with horrible legacy web compatibility issues.

Where does that come from?  I never suggested 'breaking' anything, I was
responding to the suggestion that "known-good" (in the sense that they
are commonly available) things were 'broken' by hiding them away as
"legacy" or "not idealogically correct".

I certainly agree that websites should not be made "IE only" (or
"Firefox only", or any other "best viewed with <x> browser").  The
purpose of websites, certainly the one under discussion, is to
communicate, and in my view that should use the least possible of any
specific code or at least provide alternatives to it.

> In this case, I think the right thing to do is put content on sites in open 
> formats.  If they are difficult to play, then explanations should be provided 
> in the short-term, and plugins should be provided in the long-term.

In the short term, it should be in the most common format, and also any
other formats you want.  In the long term you can try to educate people
as why your preferred format is 'best', but if you lose them at the
first gate you'll never get as far as educating them.  The same as I do
when a site requires Flash, JavaScript or some other format or plugin I
don't have, in fact, all that does in the way of 'educating' me is to
make sure that I disregard that site in future.

If Theora, like Flash, prompted to say "You can't play this at the
moment, but click on here and install this plugin" then I suspect most
people would probably do it (OK, I wouldn't but then I'm bolshie about
plugins).  But what actually happens is a popup saying "Windows doesn't
recognise the file time, pick one from the list of installed
applications or visit the website" (and their website says it doesn't
know anything about ogg files).  (Yes, I tried it on a Windows machine,
under Firefox, without Realplayer or Quicktime or Flash or VLC
installed, that's what it did.)  That sort of thing will just put people
off and cause them to say "those silly Open Source people don't want me
to look at this".

A similar reaction happened with PNG.  All that happened when IE users
visited sites with only PNG format files was that they said "this site
is crap" and went somewhere else.

Quite frankly, I can see why free software gets a bad image.  It's the
people for whom the ideology is primary who pick on others in the same
movement who don't share their exact ideological stance, and attack then
for daring to use [shock, horror] 'non-free' software who get the whole
movement portrayed as fanatics.

Chris C