flash for linux

[Joseph Sinclair]

The Flash system is a proprietary product of Macromedia.  They only support Windows and OS/X, so building Flash sites on Linux is fairly difficult, and Linux users find it ranges from difficult to impossible to view Flash (especially since the new Flash player 8 will not be released on Linux anytime soon).
 That said, there are a few projects in existence to get a Flash-building solution running on Linux, but all of them (as you may have noticed) are far from complete.

Why try to learn Flash at all.  Why not learn the Web standard for flashy, interactive, graphics-intensive websites, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
This standard is already fully as functional as Flash, and the support in various browsers is rapidly approaching completion (90% complete in the next Firefox/Gecko release, same with KHTML (Konqueror and Safari)).
SVG is a dialect of XML, so it's fully searchable (Flash is not), and it's easy to make SVG accessible to persons with visual disabilities (just follow a few simple rules), Flash cannot be made accessible.
The biggest part of SVG that's missing right now is good support in the development tools for declarative animation and scripted interaction, but that support is expected soon, as the tools mature and the browser support expands.  In the meantime, you can develop SVG without tools (Flash cannot be edited without tools) using a simple text editor.  The Adobe viewer is available for Windows Internet Explorer along with a few other platforms, including some Linux systems.  Better support on Linux is coming with the next Firefox release (as noted above).

If you're writing websites, definitely examine the W3C standards for doing so, since a standards-compliant website will be accessible to more people on more platforms for a longer time than a non-compliant site.

You should also try to make all sites you create/work on as compliant with the W3C accessibility guidelines as possible, it's simply the Right Thing(r) to do.

Some relevant links:
W3C                                   http://www.w3.org/
Web Standards Project                 http://webstandards.org/
Cascading Style Sheets                http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
Scalable Vector Graphics              http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
Website Accessibility Initiative      http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines  http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php

==Joseph++

Josh Coffman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 
>   I do side work like websites sometimes, and everyso
> often ide possibilty of using flash is there. Since,
> I've migrated to linux and ha to learn all sorts of
> new stuff, figured maybe I could learn Flash too. I
> even found a sourceforge project http://f4l.sf.net.
> 
> Any one ever used it? Can anyone point me in the right
> direction to get started with flash in general for
> f4l? Or any other suggestions for writing flash on
> linux?
> 
> TIA,
> -j
> 
> 
> 	
> 		
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