Apple's Flash policy is a breach of Postel's Law | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Flash policy is a breach of Postel's Law

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20 pointsbrilliant25 comments

If Flash were standing on the same RFC-based ground that TCP is (Jon Postel was speaking of a principle that implementations of TCP should do) then Dave might have a point.

Heck, I'll be generous and say that Dave might have a point if he were referring to an independent implementation of Flash, and what it ought do.

But mobile Safari is not a flash runtime, it's a web browser, and so its duty to the robustness principle is to be strict about what it sends (HTTP GETs and POSTs) and permissive about what it receives (HTTP responses, HTML/CSS/Javascript documents). It is no more obligated to include a Flash plugin than it is to have a plugin for Iterated Fractal Systems image compressor.

I think it's worth noting that there's an important class of software that needs to be strict about what they receive — compilers — and I often find myself wishing that browsers were more like compilers. But that's just when I get sour thinking about the excessive permissiveness of IE.

That's utter nonsense. Postel's Law doesn't say anything about that. You're just making it up.

Of course he didn't specifically mention mobile safari. That's why it's a "principle": it applies to other situations too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postels_law

If anything, websites that depend upon Flash are "defective implementation that send non-conforming messages".

Comparing the scope, history, and benefits of Flash to a fractal compressor is childish. It's posts like this than make HN look like a bunch of techno-babbling trolls.

"Supporting plug-ins" is clearly a well-tested and marketed phrase to divert attention from the real issue: a business blockade. Only the weakest (or most biased) of programmers fall for it.

That's a lot to digest: childish && (week || biased) && troll? Is this subject really worth that much vitriol?

On what basis is a browser author obligated to support any plugin system whatsoever? I don't want an answer as to why Apple must...I want to know why any arbitrary browser vendor, in your world, should not be free to make that product decision.

Edit: I submit that if you cannot answer that question, having removed Apple from the equation, that it is not me who is biased.

It's not your terminology that I found childish & trollish; it was the comparison of Flash to a fractal generator along with an all-too-obvious deviation from the original point, i.e. a straw man*

It's not a lack of plugin support that prevents Flash from working on iOS. It's strictly business rules (which was the point of the article). Your first comment makes hay over the former and your second comment dismisses the latter.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman

"A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar yet weaker proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position."

By Winer's logic, shouldn't the iPad also support Java, Silverlight, Realplayer, Shockwave, Windows Media Player and Quicktime? There's definitely useful information locked into each of those formats as well.

Arguing that browsers should support plugins because they might be necessary to display useful information is a really slippery slope, and would be a wonderful way for Apple to get stuck in business relationships with notoriously incompetent companies like Adobe for little to no actual benefit. I'm not convinced that there are a significant number of people who would let the lack of Flash influence their decision to buy an iPad--certainly not a significant enough number of people for Apple to cede a portion of control over their platform to a company that has repeatedly demonstrated a complete inability to make Flash work on mobile (or really, any) platforms.

The iPad need not support Java, Silverlight, Realplayer, Shockwave, or Windows Media Player by default; I believe that Quicktime is supported through the Video player. But it should be allowed to be made to support Java, Silverlight, Realplayer, Shockwave, and Windows Media files if desired.

"... cede a portion of control over their platform ..." I can't help thinking that if Microsoft had restricted Quicktime from Windows machines, with the excuse that it's utter crap and no good, there would be an intense amount of lawsuits pending from Apple already.

The brilliant Jon Postel was speaking of the implementation and design of open standards. Flash may be ubiquitous, but it would never be called a standard by anyone subscribing to the IETF rules-of-the-road.

BTW, Apple also does not implement Wordstar and WordPerfect readers, nor do they accept TARGA images. As much as I do wish 1) Adobe had a version of Flash that didn't suck; 2) Apple supported it, let's not attempt to invoke Jon's memory for this kind of stuff.

You're wrong. Postel's Law is a principle of software design.

We could spark a whole discussion about whether Postel's "law" is a universal good thing (it makes more sense in early-stage standardization efforts than it does in software design), but do we really need to dignify the asinine argument that Postel meant browsers must support specific plugins?

Of course we should dignify the argument: the Flash plug-in is a standard used billions of times a day by millions of people.

It's only asinine to pretend it's not a modern standard by reducing it to "just a plug-in" because it's unpopular (and virulently envied?) on this forum.

"A standard technology" is not the same as "a standard". Flash is not a (public) standard, however standard it may be.

I <3 HN.

Word is a "standard" used billions of times a day by millions of people, too. On a typical IE install, click on a Word doc, it'll pop right up. Obviously, every browser should support Word, too!

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/22/iphone-can-read-word-excel-pd...

in your case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

"A slippery slope argument states that a relatively small first step inevitably leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant impact, much like an object given a small push over the edge of a slope sliding all the way to the bottom."

Invoking Jon Postel does not make a wrong argument right. The only thing that makes apple 'wrong' in this case is that they restrict the deployment of browsers that would support flash.

I realize it makes me a pompous ass, but being a pure mathematics student has caused me to recoil whenever anyone quotes a "law" of the soft sciences and uses it as proof.

I am quite glad to be in a field where deductive logic is used; these sorts of tirades where its up for debate whether or not what you're saying applies (or was even correct in the first place) don't really happen.

Forgive us compsci folks our lack of rigor and correctness here. We're emboldened by the likes of Moore who, through remarkable intuition, created predictions that match the facts with startling accuracy.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, though. Calling everything a "law" is a nasty habit that has crept into compsci's pop literature over the last decade.

Let's imagine Postel's law applies. Postel's law would say that if MobileSafari had a plugin system (or one extensible by third parties anyway), Flash should not be refused.

Well, MobileSafari doesn't have a plugin system available to third parties. Thus solving the issue: Postel's Law applies exactly nowhere in this case.

The comparison between Apple's business decisions and Postel's comments on a protocol implementation is invalid.

Other people might invoke Postel's name to amplify their own message, but that's just not what he was talking about.

Furthermore, if you believe for a second that Jon Postel would have been a supporter of Adobe Flash, then I assert that you weren't alive when he was. I imagine he'd have equally strong objections to Apple, but that's neither here nor there.

Whether or not that was headed anywhere compelling, he ruined it when he insinuated that market cap is comparable to market share.

For me he ruined it when he tried to use Jon Postel to further his agenda. It's a not very veiled attempt at using Jon Postel and his reputation to 'trump' the reputation of Steve Jobs, which you might be able to apply if Apple decided to come up with a non-standard version of HTML tomorrow morning but has no place in the 'should the ipad/iphone/somegadget built in browser' support flash, yes or no.

And I actually think it should (simply because that would be a convenience, if flash is to be replaced it can happen without resorting to user inconvenience as a means of applying pressure).

Ofcourse, Apple's smartphone OS market share was already higher than Microsoft smartphone OS market share, far before AAPL was valued higher than MSFT.

The whole flash discussion is purely hypothetical: Whether Apple would/should allow some of Adobe's vaporware, might it one day be realized, on the iOS platform?

And this is not even considering that the iOS version of Safari (afaik) doesn't even have a plugin infrastructure to support 3d party plugins.

Personally I don't think Adobe can actually make a stable, efficient, full implementation of the flash plugin for a iphone/ipad style mobile device? After years of trying they still can't make one for any full power Mac, so why should anyone assume that they can for much slower mobile-devices?

I think Adobe's strategy is to make as much noise about the relevance of flash, keep promising an implementation of Flash "really soon now", while they'll wait until the hardware of mobile devices has become fast enough to handle flash without draining the battery.

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