These days I’m usually out of touch of the whole blogosphere discussions, primarily because I’ve been researching on my final year project, apart from enjoying the final months of the college life ; but that’s beside point.

It recently came to my notice that Adobe is planning to release a new cross OS platform, Apollo in 2007. I did a bit of reading and from the looks, I can’t say I really get what they’re trying to sell.

In its barest essentials, its seems like a rendering engine that would be able to render HTML, Actioscript and the rest of them seemlessly. Now the existing browsers do the job quite well enough I believe, and It’s quite hard to see the point, till you realise that Flash has actually failed to be a part of the whole World Wide Web Architecture.

Now, don’t get me wrong over here. I don’t have a personal enimety with Flash. In fact I love it’s ability to create sophisticated interactions. It is pretty good for those cool demos and amazing games but as much as the guys at former Macromedia or the Adobe would like to believe : it was never the driving force of the internet.

The incongruency of Flash and the WWW cannot be expressed better than in the following extract from Tim-Berners Lee’s(the inventor of the world wide web) discussion on the design of Web :

“…In choosing computer languages, there are classes of program which range from the plainly descriptive (such as Dublin Core metadata, or the content of most databases, or HTML) though logical languages of limited power … to those which are unashamedly procedural (Java, C).

The choice of language is a common design choice. The low power end of the scale is typically simpler to design, implement and use, but the high power end of the scale has all the attraction…

… Nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful. The reason for this is that the less powerful the language, the more you can do with the data stored in that language. If you write it in a simple declarative from, anyone can write a program to analyze it in many ways… At the other end of the scale is the weather information portrayed by the cunning Java applet. While this might allow a very cool user interface, it cannot be analyzed at all. The search engine finding the page will have no idea of what the data is or what it is about. This the only way to find out what a Java applet means is to set it running in front of a person…”(full page here)

or for a different perspective, consider this by Jakob Nielson, one of the gurus of web usability :

“…Although multimedia has its role on the Web, current Flash technology tends to discourage usability for three reasons: it makes bad design more likely, it breaks with the Web’s fundamental interaction style, and it consumes resources that would be better spent enhancing a site’s core value.

About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease. Although there are rare occurrences of good Flash design (it even adds value on occasion), the use of Flash typically lowers usability. In most cases, we would be better off if these multimedia objects were removed…” (full article here)

You get the picture. The reason for the death of Java, or the failure of Flash is decievingly simple : they both seem to be running in the opposite direction of the very basic principles of the WWW. May be Adobe believes that they are nearing towards correcting the fundamental flaw in these technologies ; but from where I can see, they couldn’t be farther.

Now with this Apollo project, Adobe is once again showing that it thinks it can drive the next revolution in computing by introducing another well-hidden standard such as Java or Flash. They have been pretty clever with this, no doubt because of the years of experiences with Flash and Acrobat : the Apollo enviroment is backward compatible with all the major publishing standtards as well as with all the current browsers and they do deserve credit for this. But as far as the next big thing on the web is considered, I don’t think I’ll be too harsh when I say it falls too short.