Trying to Resolve Resolvo's OO.CBT

I'm torn.

On the one hand, OpenOffice.org is a powerful and therefore complex program, and so benefits from a little bit of training. On the other hand, the OO.CBT interactive tutorial from Resolvo (free for home users), while quite well done, is written entirely in Flash....

Ah well, you'll just have to make up your own mind on this one. (Via OpenOffice.org Training, Tips and Ideas.)

All Hail, Mighty Ajax

As I may have mentioned before, I hate Flash. But this blog post about a report on the state of Web development gives me hope:

Most web technologies will apparently be used more - in particular Ajax, which next year is predicted to surpass Flash for the first time.

Did somebody say nike?

The Holy Grail: DHTML-based OpenLaszlo

For a long time I have been fulminating against Flash, which seems to be spreading across the Web like some latter-day Black Death. Anathemata are one thing, but alternatives are even better; and today, somewhat belatedly, I have come across the Holy Grail of rich Internet apps: a DHTML-based solution.

It's called OpenLaszlo, it's open source (as its name implies), and it's pretty cool. The DHTML stuff is still at an early stage, but there is a demo. Now, all I have to do is get a few billion Web pages to convert.

Gnashing and Wailing

The GNU Project is working on a full-featured, completely free, Flash player, called Gnash. I suppose they had to do it, because for them the problem is the proprietary nature of the main Flash player.

But for me, the problem is Flash, full stop.

Closing the Web

For a long time, I have had two great Web hates: pages made up of PDFs and those using Flash animations. I realise now that to these I have to add a third, and for the same reason: they all undermine the openness and transparency that underlie the Web's enormous power.

I hate PDFs because they are opaque compared to Web pages. With the latter, you can see the underlying code and get at (in programming terms) individual elements of the page. This is important if you want to do clever Web 2.0-y things with content, such as mixing and matching (and mashing).

I hate Flash animations even more: they are not only opaque - there is no cyber-there there - they are barriers to my free navigation of the Web and waste my time as they download. In effect, they turn the Web into television.

To these, I must now add TinyURLs. In themselves, they are a great idea: too many Internet addresses have become long snaking strings of apparently random text. But the solution - to replace this with a unique but shorter URL beginning http://tinyurl.com commits the sin of obscuring the address, an essential component of the open Web.

So while I applaud TinyURL's rigorous terms of use, I never follow any TinyURLs in my Web wanderings, however easy and seductive they might be. For all I know, they might well be taking me straight to a PDF or Flash animation.