28 July 2010

A Quick Technical Note

As you’ve noticed, this blog has been unusually quiet ... for a music blog.

Part of this was struggling to figure out the enormity of the task I have undertaken for myself to wring out the most interesting sweat from the towel that was “2009 in Music” but another part was following the Fall of Flash mini-saga, as it were.

This blog uses Flash and wishes it didn’t. I’ve never been much of a fan of it but our use of it is fairly tiny, quick-loading even to those on slower connections, and easy to go from MP3 file to streaming music player.



HTML5 promises to change this, not only making the coding part easier to do but also expanding the range of browsers that can cope with the demands of streaming audio (and video). I have done some experiments in this regard -- most of you will be able to see that I’ve added an HTML5 version of the player to the Van Morrison sample track alongside the Flash version on this post -- but because of some technical limitations I can’t overcome (mostly stupid Firefox [shakes fist]), I cannot yet replace the flash audio players with HTML5 at this time. Much as I’d like to.

So, for now things will continue with Flash audio and (when we do video) Flash video. I apologise to your processors.

No comments:

ShareThis!