From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-08-25T03:58:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Which Frontend Technology for an Online Game of Risk? SVG Maps?

Mariano Kamp wrote:
> Well, yes, I forgot to state another constraint ... I don't know flash
> and emotionally ;-) I don't want to go there ... ;-)

If you look past the bad rap and the reputedly Notte Very Neat API, 
Flash is still, by far, the most reliable way to get a contained 
rich-client -ish application to run in a webbrowser. Especially if it 
involves any form of multimedia. I'd go there if you don't absolutely 
need to talk to the surrounding webpage. (iSketch is one of the most 
addictive in-webbrowser games I ever played for example, and I honestly 
have no idea just how you could do that using only AJAX without severe lag.)

Animated SVG to me seems to have pretty much the same potential to 
create obnoxious ads as Flash does, comparatively little actual 
functionality you could use, except it's probably larger to download and 
more CPU intensive to process (being XML-based and all). Except it's W3C 
approved, therefore Good and Holy, and more likely to have various 
fanboys ranting for than against it.

Bottom line: use what will work. A *lot* of people have Flash installed. 
Probably more so than have a SVG-enabled web browser - cf. the still 
majority of IE6 users. And as was already mentioned, the lagging Linux 
support can be worked around, and that's something anyone that wants to 
play any games on Linuxen has to be used to by now anyway.

David Vallner