The web is now officially complex...
Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 4:47PM
I've been building web applications, and managing web environments for many years now.
Over the last 8 or ten years, the increased interactivity in a site based upon complex client side software that does things to the DOM, based upon logic outside the DOM has caused what I consider to be many headaches. While its ability to give us value, like inline video, and cute animations and such are good, they are not in and of themselves, reasons to engineer new types of content around them. What they do provide is impetus to change.
Flash and its bretheren are just more of a pain in the ass than they are worth. But I've never really seen any adverse effects, other than stories like this:
I browse to a site, and it requires a newer version of flash.
I upgrade the flash on my machine. I open my browser, and browse to the URL of the site above, and still get the same problem. I installed the lastest and greatest, but it still thinks it needs something newer.
This happens over and over until I give up.
So, I've had prroblems with getting flash to work properly, but its never really interfered with things i was trying to do.
Until today.
There is a problem in WordPress where the version of Flash that you are using will cause the media upload panel to not work properly.
I had to disable the Shockwave Flash 10 plugin in a friends browser, because it was disabling, or making invisible certain controls on the media upload screen in WordPress.
I didn't look at the html, and css to see what was going on, but
Well, I was shocked. What is Flash doing marking up the page's DOM anyway? Does WordPress actually use Flash for something? Why on earth would they, if they want to maintain any semblance of web standards compliance?
It just seems pointless to me - to have an infrastructure as simple as the web be burdened with complexities that cause incompatibilities that have such weird side effects. I'd love to see the Flash source code.- based upon just this evidence alone, I bet its just a mess.
Enough ranting.
html in
TechnoGeek 


