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Google is banning Flash from its display ads

theverge.com

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Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#31

Post by jdangu »

0x0 wrote: post #19

How can they continue to allow "video ads built in flash"? Isn't a video flash just like any other .swf, that happens to use the NetConnection, NetStream and Video classes? Or will they supply the .swf part and the advertisers just the .flv/.mp4 part? Also, what's to stop a "html5 ad" from inlining swfobject.js? They've fallen for malvertising before, so how could they not fall for an obfuscated swfobject.js? :)

This is because video ads use an obnoxious ad API called VPAID [1] that is mostly used to track viewability of video ads (which in turn conditions the billing event for advertisers). This is most effectively done with Flash and so 90% of video ads use Flash if given the opportunity.

[1] http://www.iab.net/guidelines/508676/digitalvideo/vsuite/vpa...

Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#32

Post by dheera »

lukeman wrote: post #11
pippy wrote: post #8

One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but it didn't get anywhere.

Couldn't you use inline scripts and styles with images specified as data uris?

Data URLs for large images are horribly space-inefficient.

Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#35

Post by seanp2k2 »

pippy wrote: post #8

One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but it didn't get anywhere.

Bundles might make sense, but one large blob that couldn't be parsed until it was finished loading would probably be a big step backward for responsiveness. Parallel downloads also help speed things up.

Another interesting idea for JS-heavy sites is server-side pre rendering (yes, having the server generate HTML like the good old bad days) like Ember FastBoot http://tomdale.net/2015/02/youre-missing-the-point-of-server...

Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#36

Post by spankalee »

pippy wrote: post #8

One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but it didn't get anywhere.

HTML Imports basically give you bundling, at least for CSS, JS, markup, and things you can fit into data URLs. It'd be awesome to explore how HTML can serve as a better bundling format for ES2015 modules and generic files like video.

Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#37

Post by ktRolster »

manigandham wrote: post #6

This is great progress. Google being the biggest ad network and going with a complete ban is probably the only way to move things forward but glad to see it finally being done.

It sounds like great progress.......until you realize that Google uses Flash everywhere in their own APIs

Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#39

Post by ghayes »

dheera wrote: post #32
lukeman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you use inline scripts and styles with images specified as data uris?

Data URLs for large images are horribly space-inefficient.

Data URLs should be ~1.37x the size [0] of the original file (and generally, kept in the same format). Obviously, there are issues of caching, keeping the image loaded in memory, etc, but it shouldn't be all that bad. Esp. when you consider that ads are inefficient for a variety of other reasons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#MIME

Re: Google is banning Flash from its display ads

#40

Post by glass55 »

pippy wrote: post #8

One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but it didn't get anywhere.

You could encode assets using "base64" and put everything in a single JS file. There may be a file size issue though, but I did that a few times (actually I did that with html files using data uris)
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