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The IAB Canada and their standards has been a subject of much interest for me and others recently. Valentin actually started a conversation with them recently and I thought I’d re-post what has come out of it here.

When asked about their standards, the IAB Canada states that even though there is a 95% penetration of the version 9 player (the stats since then have gone up and now stand at around 98%) there are other issues standing in the way. Here is a quote from an email from them about these issues.

First and foremost is the fact one of the very few ways in which Flash 9 differs from Flash 8 is action script 3. Many publishers and publisher tools said they simply didn’t have the ability to reverse compile and assist/debug/handle files with AS3. Flash 9 also offers external script support, which is currently unsupported by most ad servers.

Additionally Flash 9 has some enhanced graphical filters that are extremely CPU intensive. We need to take steps to ensure files are gentle enough to be displayed 4 at a time per page before we can allow them to use all available features. As of yet this measurement is almost impossible so it would be very dangerous to open the floodgates to the full feature set.

We also asked many expert designers their opinion, all of which said that while Flash 9 support would be nice, there was virtually nothing that would be impossible working in Flash 8. The consensus was that Flash 9 had some convenience features and some shiny bells and whistles, but very few new features that were irreplaceable. The biggest concern was designers not being made aware of the Flash 9 restriction and building it without the reigns on, because apparently back-porting the code would be quite tedious and painful.

We’ll continue to monitor designers opinions and work on a CPU usage system, while taking your nudge into consideration. So while I don’t think it’s time yet, it’s definitely on the radar.

Let’s have a look at these point.

I’m pretty sure “reverse compiling” is not something that Adobe looks kindly on. As for assistance/debugging, AS3 has been around for over two years now. I think it’s time that publishers get staff that are trained to handle AS3.

I’m not exactly sure what they mean by “external script support” but AS3 does offer some very significant advantages over AS2. Consider for example that AS3 can naively handle XML. With emerging platforms like Dapper, using Flash 8 seems somewhat backwards as the banner would need to pull additional resources to decompile the XML dap before being able to consume it.

As for the CPU insensitivity, I would tend to disagree since it really is the developer that makes a banner CPU intensive, not the SWF (regardless of version) as such. Slowing down a PCs performance can be done with a Bitmap rich Flash 5 banner very easily. Or I could build a Flash 8 banner that was completely IAB Canada compliant with Papervision and use up more than 100% of the CPU.

Furthermore, consider the following about Flash 9’s performance (taken from the release notes):

* Faster ActionScript Performance
Flash Player 9 delivers up to 10x performance improvement for ActionScript 3.0 execution.

* Reduced Memory Footprint
ActionScript 3.0 applications use less memory than equivalent ActionScript 2.0 applications.

* Multi-core support
Speed the rendering of vectors, bitmaps, filters and video, including true 1080p video, with new multi-core support that takes advantage of up to 4 CPUs.

* Hardware scaling
Improve the performance and quality of full-screen video through the use of hardware scaling.

* Multi-threaded video decoding
The VP6 video codec now runs in a separate thread on multi-core systems, enabling true 1080p video. In addition, the responsiveness and decode blockiness of the VP6 codec is improved with this change.

* Image scaling
A new algorithm for scaling bitmap images enhances the quality and rendering performance of downscaled images.

* Flash Player cache
The Flash Player cache enables common components, such as the Flex Framework, to be cached locally and then used by any SWF from any domain. Use of the Flash Player cache can significantly reduce SWF file sizes and speed application download times.

* Flash Media Server buffering
The stream buffer is maintained while a stream is paused.

http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/releasenotes.html

So clearly CPU usage can’t be a real concern when all of this is considered.

On the question of “expert designers”, I would like to know what expert designers think that programming in AS3 only ads bells and whistles?? And potentially, they should be asking programmers, NOT designers’ opinion as we are the ones actually using the features available to AS3 and producing the banners in question. Sure, the actual IDE hasn’t changed to the point that using flash 8 is a problem if you’re not a programmer and only use the flash interface. In that case, Flash 9 doesn’t add that much. But if you compare AS3 to AS2, there is a major difference.

Potentially when AS3 just came out, not having AS3 support was less of a problem as most programmers were still used to programming in AS2. Now, 2 years later, I virtually never code in AS2 and find it increasingly difficult to keep up with both AS3 and AS2, the languages being so different from one another. Sure, when push comes to shove, I could probably squeeze out what I need of AS2, but at a cost to performance and production time, which translates into money being spent to compensate.

All the expert programmers I talk to agree that not being able to use AS3 in banners is a problem.

As for third party ad servers like Eyereturn, Bluestreak, DoubleClick and Eyeblaster, they all support and allow the use of Flash 9 and AS3.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Is the IAB Canada setting a standard or only answering to the lowest common denominator.

IAB Canada standards are now two full version behind when it comes to flash and I think this needs to be addressed quickly. And I’m convinced that if the IAB Canada updated their standards, a large number of publishers would follow suit.

Please comment on this subject. I think a real conversation needs to take place about this so we can finally move forward.

Tags: IAB Canada, Online Advertising