When President Obama announced that one of his goals was greater government transparency, I was thrilled. When the White House announced that it was switching to open-source Drupal, I was even more thrilled. Not only were we promised a flood of open, accessible data from the government, but open source would have a real place at the table for the first time ever. Open data would allow people outside the government to collect, mash up, and mine that data for any purpose imaginable. Government would finally be accountable to the people, now that the people would have tools that could help them audit government activities. And yet, as grand as these ideas sound, we’re not really out of the woods yet. For one thing, the very definition of “open” is up in the air.
Tomorrow, Adobe is holding a conference in Washington, D.C. to convince federal employees that proprietary technologies like Flash and PDF are “essential” to creating open government. Why are they so essential, you might ask? Well, according to Adobe, “[s]ince the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology.” Yes, that’s right, PDF and Flash technologies date back to “the advent of the web!” And as the Sunlight Foundation says, “Here’s a hint– if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for transparency or open data.” Yes, vast numbers of people have the Flash plugin installed on their browser; yes, vast numbers of people have a PDF reader installed on their computer. But the ability of the “average user” to access government data doesn’t constitute open government. Can screen readers understand Flash content? (This is a real question; I don’t honestly know.) Should the American public realistically be expected to support a non-governmental company like Adobe (by downloading and installing their software, and by making government purchase Flash / PDF creation tools) just to get some information about what Congress is doing? Sure, PDF is an “open standard” with multiple implementations, and it’s head-and-shoulders above Microsoft Word in terms of openness, but pulling text data out of PDFs takes a lot of work.
There are certainly alternatives. At the “advent of the web” that Adobe calls us to remember, linked text documents were the norm. Not Flash; not PDF; not any form of styled display technology. The Web was data in its purest state, marked up only in semantic ways to indicate lists, paragraphs, and tables (which didn’t even arrive until HTML2!). I happen to think that this format is perfect for government data as well. When was the last time you thought to yourself that a federal statute would be more open and accessible if it just had some animation? When was the last time you seriously cared about what font a government press release was issued in, or what each page’s headers and footers looked like? Perhaps there is a place for archival storage of documents in a true-to-life format – even so, those archives should be storing images in an open format like TIFF, while saving machine-readable (and general-purpose use) data for marked-up text.
Flash’s eternal game of catch-up
This news story makes me think about my experiences with the Flash Platform over the last year. Originally, I was anti-Flash. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to pay Adobe large amounts of money for Flash Professional – the only way to produce content for Flash Player – just to make content that would only work by way of a plugin. Times changed bit by bit; Adobe started creating actually usable versions of Flash Player for Linux, and the Flex framework became mainstream and open-source. Finally you could write Flash apps entirely in ActionScript in a text editor! Of course, you still needed that plugin to make things work at the other end, but the plugin was available pretty much everywhere.
I really got interested in Flash when I saw a website that used Flex to make pie charts on-the-fly from numbers in a database. I was amazed – this was real eye candy created by programmatic means. I had been interested in data visualization already, and Flex seemed too good to pass up. I learned my way around Flex Builder 3 (available free to students), picked up some basic ActionScript skills, and started making simple web apps. Then the disappointment started hitting home.
“What do you mean there’s no Flash support for iPhone?” That was where things started going downhill. Apple, creator of quite likely the most impressive personal gadget ever devised, had flat-out said no to Adobe. Even Youtube, the first site to really show off the power of streaming Flash video, had agreed to convert their entire archive to another format just to please Apple. And it wasn’t even a hacky kludge – h.264 Youtube actually worked well. So why should anyone bother to lock their content into Flash Video? Then I started noticing more and more problems with the Flash plugin. It was unresponsive; it hogged system resources; it crashed my browser. Finally, I started reading about Google Wave. Here was HTML5 and the best of JavaScript together in one, and it did everything the Flash Player could do only better.
So I’ve turned my back on Flash for the time being. I’m interested to see what happens with Flex 4, but I’m not planning any big projects using it. As the browser wars have taught us, technology inevitably moves toward standardization and open formats. Adobe even seems to realize this – Dreamweaver CS5 can create HTML5 charts and graphs from data sources, instead of making Flex charts. Flash is in a sorry state, and I hope that Adobe will either find a new way to revitalize this platform, bringing in the designers and developers it has alienated over the years, or else put Flash out of its misery and develop the tools that will make designers fall in love with HTML5 the same way they fell in love with Macromedia Flash MX.
Ok, rant mode off. Any personal feelings about the Flash Platform or open government that you’d like to share? I’d especially like to hear from anyone in the Miami area; South Florida seems to be overflowing with Flash designers and Flash-only websites.
Adobe, OpenGov, and Flash
When President Obama announced that one of his goals was greater government transparency, I was thrilled. When the White House announced that it was switching to open-source Drupal, I was even more thrilled. Not only were we promised a flood of open, accessible data from the government, but open source would have a real place at the table for the first time ever. Open data would allow people outside the government to collect, mash up, and mine that data for any purpose imaginable. Government would finally be accountable to the people, now that the people would have tools that could help them audit government activities. And yet, as grand as these ideas sound, we’re not really out of the woods yet. For one thing, the very definition of “open” is up in the air.
Tomorrow, Adobe is holding a conference in Washington, D.C. to convince federal employees that proprietary technologies like Flash and PDF are “essential” to creating open government. Why are they so essential, you might ask? Well, according to Adobe, “[s]ince the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology.” Yes, that’s right, PDF and Flash technologies date back to “the advent of the web!” And as the Sunlight Foundation says, “Here’s a hint– if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for transparency or open data.” Yes, vast numbers of people have the Flash plugin installed on their browser; yes, vast numbers of people have a PDF reader installed on their computer. But the ability of the “average user” to access government data doesn’t constitute open government. Can screen readers understand Flash content? (This is a real question; I don’t honestly know.) Should the American public realistically be expected to support a non-governmental company like Adobe (by downloading and installing their software, and by making government purchase Flash / PDF creation tools) just to get some information about what Congress is doing? Sure, PDF is an “open standard” with multiple implementations, and it’s head-and-shoulders above Microsoft Word in terms of openness, but pulling text data out of PDFs takes a lot of work.
There are certainly alternatives. At the “advent of the web” that Adobe calls us to remember, linked text documents were the norm. Not Flash; not PDF; not any form of styled display technology. The Web was data in its purest state, marked up only in semantic ways to indicate lists, paragraphs, and tables (which didn’t even arrive until HTML2!). I happen to think that this format is perfect for government data as well. When was the last time you thought to yourself that a federal statute would be more open and accessible if it just had some animation? When was the last time you seriously cared about what font a government press release was issued in, or what each page’s headers and footers looked like? Perhaps there is a place for archival storage of documents in a true-to-life format – even so, those archives should be storing images in an open format like TIFF, while saving machine-readable (and general-purpose use) data for marked-up text.
Flash’s eternal game of catch-up
This news story makes me think about my experiences with the Flash Platform over the last year. Originally, I was anti-Flash. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to pay Adobe large amounts of money for Flash Professional – the only way to produce content for Flash Player – just to make content that would only work by way of a plugin. Times changed bit by bit; Adobe started creating actually usable versions of Flash Player for Linux, and the Flex framework became mainstream and open-source. Finally you could write Flash apps entirely in ActionScript in a text editor! Of course, you still needed that plugin to make things work at the other end, but the plugin was available pretty much everywhere.
I really got interested in Flash when I saw a website that used Flex to make pie charts on-the-fly from numbers in a database. I was amazed – this was real eye candy created by programmatic means. I had been interested in data visualization already, and Flex seemed too good to pass up. I learned my way around Flex Builder 3 (available free to students), picked up some basic ActionScript skills, and started making simple web apps. Then the disappointment started hitting home.
“What do you mean there’s no Flash support for iPhone?” That was where things started going downhill. Apple, creator of quite likely the most impressive personal gadget ever devised, had flat-out said no to Adobe. Even Youtube, the first site to really show off the power of streaming Flash video, had agreed to convert their entire archive to another format just to please Apple. And it wasn’t even a hacky kludge – h.264 Youtube actually worked well. So why should anyone bother to lock their content into Flash Video? Then I started noticing more and more problems with the Flash plugin. It was unresponsive; it hogged system resources; it crashed my browser. Finally, I started reading about Google Wave. Here was HTML5 and the best of JavaScript together in one, and it did everything the Flash Player could do only better.
So I’ve turned my back on Flash for the time being. I’m interested to see what happens with Flex 4, but I’m not planning any big projects using it. As the browser wars have taught us, technology inevitably moves toward standardization and open formats. Adobe even seems to realize this – Dreamweaver CS5 can create HTML5 charts and graphs from data sources, instead of making Flex charts. Flash is in a sorry state, and I hope that Adobe will either find a new way to revitalize this platform, bringing in the designers and developers it has alienated over the years, or else put Flash out of its misery and develop the tools that will make designers fall in love with HTML5 the same way they fell in love with Macromedia Flash MX.
Ok, rant mode off. Any personal feelings about the Flash Platform or open government that you’d like to share? I’d especially like to hear from anyone in the Miami area; South Florida seems to be overflowing with Flash designers and Flash-only websites.