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Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 9:30 AM -0800 1/17/03, Tim Bray wrote:
>
> > The notion that you can make money by setting up a tollbooth on a
> > piece of Web infrastructure (and thereby driving out all
> > open-source/free offerings as a side-effect) is a radical proposal
> > without even an existence proof.
>
>
> Would either Flash or RealAudio qualify as an existence proof? If not,
> why not?
In my opinion, Flash serves as a demonstration of the limitations of
proprietary formats. Less then 10% of the data on the Web the _should
be_ vector graphics _are_ vector graphics and the same goes for
animations. The concept of "animated GIF" is pretty bizarre and yet
amazingly popular: because to date the alternative has been Flash with
all of its proprietary binary badness. I'm expecting SVG to change that
situation.
RealAudio is also not a good example because the audio-on-the-Web world
is badly fragmented between various encoding forms. That would probably
not happen if the W3C had blessed an RF real-time audio format.
Paul Prescod
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