Oscar Trelles

Reading Owen’s and Eric’s posts brought me back some nice memories from the beginning of my career as a web designer/technologist. To be completely honest (and risking to sound a little cheesy), learning about Flash changed the course of my life about 5 years ago.

I remember the first flash site I ever saw was Gabocorp (which has been recently relaunched, after years….). The experience was kinda tricky, since some folks were trying to trick me, challenging me to recreate those effects with my conventional techniques (conventional at the time, we are talking 1998 here). As you might expect, I was puzzled and wary… until I attempted to save one of the images, and realized that wasn’t and animated gif.

Well, lots of things have changed since then. For me, Flash was first the ultimate generator of computer art, and I used it almost exclusively for that, until ActionScript was revealed. Today Flash painfully evolves toward the distributed applications market, and despite the controversial discussions and currently unsuccessful financial aspects surrounding it, I tend to think Flash is yet to have its finest moment.

Longhorn, although still due in 2005, is already causing discussion around it’s new vector graphics rendering format, code named Avalon. From the information available, I understand that Avalon is supposed to be the standard for UI rendering in Longhorn, based on a special flavor of XML, or rather custom namespaces. Bill just had to have it…

Describing UI elements and their interactions through XML is not new. Projects like XML2SWF, X-Wave and Spark, to name a few, have been trying to implement the concept in the SWF format, not to mention Royale, Macromedia’s own implementation about to enter its beta stage. On the other hand, there’s something similar being implemented by the W3C for the SVG format, namely RCC, which stands for Rendering Custom Content. DENG is also on the same path.

It is still too early to be sure if this is something we should worry about. As Darron Schall points out, too much can happen in the following two years. Personally, I am looking forward to Royale.