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Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
All the more impressive considering HTML was never meant to do anything like what it does now.
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Most things in computers were never intended to do what they do now. Hindsight is always 20/20, but foresight is the reverse. Where we are now may seem an obvious progression in retrospect, but it wasn't to the folks in the early efforts.
It's a reason I'm philosophical about things like the continual stream of security patches for Windows. Most of them fix "buffer overflow" errors, where a program expects a certain amount of data, allocates a buffer in memory to hold it, and then gets more than it expected. Where does the excess data get put? Chances are, someplace where it will overwrite something important and possibly compromise the system.
But as much as I wish all programmers would follow the maxim "Never trust your data", I can't blame the folks who wrote the code needing patching too much. It never occurred to them back then that bad guys might
deliberately try to overflow buffers to compromise systems, and there is no particular reason it should have.
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I see one concern in general: Flash might be a pain, but it's separate, and can be turned off/blocked. If an entire page is rendered in HTML5, it'll require some major browser rewriting to block all those annoying flashing images at badly-done sites (or, for that matter, anything coded with malicious intent).
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I'm not sure why. The reason why people despise Flash, aside from annoyance value, it that it requires a plugin, and you are at the mercy of it. Current versions of Firefox have a "plugin container" helper app that provides a sandbox for such things, so if the Flash player crashes and burns, it doesn't take the browser with it.
It a page is using embedded video in HTML5, the mere <video> keyword isn't enough. You still need the codec the video was created with.
And the spec is still being developed, and browsers are all being rewritten all the time as it is, so I expect code to get in there to give the user control over what actually gets rendered Not all the annoying stuff uses Flash in any case. Consider the HTML <blink> tag, or animated GIFs, or all the stuff possible in JavaScript. Controls are there for that (though many users may not be aware of how to get to and use them), and controls will evolve for other stuff, too.
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Dennis