Macromedia Corp, which wants to establish its Flash technology as the de facto standard for vector graphics-based animation on the web, scored a win today when Netscape Communications Corp agreed to license and co-market the Flash player bundled with its Navigator browser. Macromedia wants the free player distributed as far as possible, so that developers will shell out handsomely for authoring tools. Ben Dillon, director of product management for Flash, explains: We make our money by selling tools, so our strategy is to make sure everyone can see that content. The Netscape deal means users won’t even have to download the Flash player. Flash – which used to be called Shockwave – is already supported in Real Networks Inc’s RealPlayer 5 and on Web TV, and ships on the OEM CD for Windows 95 and 98. As for users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, an ActiveX control now gives them one-click access to the plug-in. Even so, Macromedia would like to see a Netscape-style bundling agreement reached with Microsoft. Macromedia won’t say whether it will publish its source code along with Netscape’s Navigator. We are working on what to do with Mozilla.org right now, says Dillon. He adds that Flash complements the vector graphic markup languages PGML and VML which have been proposed to the World Wide Web Consortium (CI No 3,421). Dillon says that where the markup languages are ASCII-based and best for static graphics on the web, Flash is binary and hence easier to compress, more like video, JPEG and GIF. We placed our bet a year ago, Dillon says. Vector graphics are critical to the web because they can be resized without loss of quality and because they are compact in terms of bandwidth use. The Netscape bundling deal makes that bet look a lot more attractive.
