I Love GitHub But...

...sometimes it can only go so far.

The fantastic people at GitHub have released yet another feature to their already impressive hosting service. They are now offering downloads for which I initially became very happy.

Until I read the fine print.

See their blog entry about it and let me know what you think (and yes, you may have already spotted the comment I left there).

It's a fantastic service, GitHub rolls updates out very frequently, I've only ever seen it problematic once and I've consistently been impressed with how much they're doing for the open source community.

So why in the world would you use flash? I quote:

If you’re still one of the holdouts, do yourself a favor and install Flash ... [snip]

I'm afraid it's not going to happen. Not only am I adverse to proprietary software I think it also smells of a closed web, something which I'm sure the GitHub guys are also adverse to.

Also, the only reason they're doing it is so that uploads can bypass their own servers ... something to do with going straight into S3 I presume. Ok, that may be so, but really?

What next?

Having to install Silverlight to perform an upload to a server. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm sure a pretty early version of HTML allowed uploads of files to servers many, many years ago.

Labels: no-flash, html, planet-catalyst, github

Inserted: 2009-02-11 21:05 (1 year, 5 months ago)

3 Comments

1. Matthew Holloway

Sometimes flash uploads are used to allow easy multiple file uploads as the HTML controls are a bit crap. HTML5 fixes multiple file uploads, http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/forms.html#concept-input-type-file-selected

Inserted: 2009-02-12 09:32 (1 year, 5 months ago)

2. David Preece

Yes, but the HTML upload control is rubbish. No progress bar, no multiple file uploads and you need to do loads of nasty iframe stunts to make it work with ajax.

Flash, proprietary or no, fills in lots of holes that the "open" HTML world just doesn't have. Silverlight, OTOH, is a cynical copy of flash.

Inserted: 2009-02-12 14:17 (1 year, 5 months ago)

3. Travis

Flash does all kinds of other stuff as well. There is a whole interactive (i.e. UI environment). What are the substitutes for that functionality?

I wanted to write some simple UI and genetic algorithm applications and flash seemed like the best option.

Is there something else out there that will do the trick?

Inserted: 2009-02-16 14:31 (1 year, 5 months ago)

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