[TAG] .SWF files (Flash)

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello,

This may be OT as far as the discussion on "flash or not" is concerned,
but here goes anyway.

I saw this a couple of times.

Here:

On Wed, 08 Feb 2006, Benjamin A. Okopnik wrote:
> Oh, and - Flash produces excellent image quality in a file size that's
> about half the size of a very poor JPG image, as well as auto-sizing
> itself to whatever the viewer's screen size is. Just a minor side note.

And here:

On Thu, 09 Feb 2006, Mike Orr wrote:
> On 2/8/06, shane <shane_collinge at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > (2) SWF are insanely small file sizes with comparably, insanely
> > high file quality that fit ANY screen res - something JPGs don't
> > do.

and I'm a bit puzzled. Why would people want to put cartoons in a JPEG
format? As I understand it JPEG is for photographs, not for drawings.

PNG is a reasonable format for drawings that need to be exported in
bitmap format. For drawings that were made in vector format and will
be subjected to arbitrary scaling there is SVG and Java...and also
Flash. As far as I know the latter is an open format, though the
software most commonly used to produce and view the content is not
free. As I pointed out earlier, there *is* software that can be used
to view flash that is free as in libre---in fact I viewed the HelpDex
stuff using swfplayer.

The only reason for leaving out PNG in the past would have been that
there were still some browser/OS combinations out there that did not
support it. Does that problem still persist?

Regards,

Kapil.
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