Adobe’s Ryan Stewart has a post on the friction between Open Web advocates and “RIA vendors”. I think Ryan does a good job describing the work being done at Adobe (and Microsoft) to become active in a larger ecosystem, namely open source and cross-platform. There are a couple bits I want to respond (emphasis mine):
I think it’s indicative of wider problems between the “open web” and RIA vendors. The basic issue is that everyone’s too combative. I wish more open web people would look at what both Microsoft and Adobe are doing and see that all in all, the RIA solutions are becoming more open, not less. In fact, I’d argue that RIAs have moved the entire web in a more open direction.
I think Ryan’s use of the term “RIA” to indicate a “proprietary vendor plugin” will cause confusion. Rich Internet Applications can be created without the need for proprietary vendor plugins. Also, what Adobe has done around open sourcing parts of their plugin system has been welcomed by everyone. However, there are still large chunks of closed source and encumbered file formats that work against the Open Web.
I’m not sure if RIAs will ever be as fully open as the open web advocates want, but think how far applications in the browser have come (as far as openness) since the days of ActiveX enhancements in IE.
As I have stated, RIAs can be fully open and, as a card carrying Open Web advocate, those make me happy. However, how far have Adobe and Microsoft come from the days of ActiveX vendor plugins? Last time I checked, ActiveX was still the technology of choice for Flash and Silverlight on IE. Honestly, even if Flash and Silverlight were completely open source, the fact they are plugins and not native Web standards will be a stumbling block for many Open Web folks.
They’ve [Flash and Silverlight] pushed the web forward in a way that it seemed the open web groups couldn’t (video, vector graphics, easy cross platform/browser development).
Yes, they have pushed the Web forward, I’ll admit that. The resurgence of SVG and the new & elements are evidence of that. But then Linux is a platform too, and I suppose that Mozilla could market Firefox as the one, true cross platform Web platform – but we don’t. We encourage choice and competition. We want developers to have choice too and not be locked into a single stack. Let me know when Flash can run a Silverlight application.
Mike Shaver responds in a comment to the post.
Nice post. Thanks.