opaque swf format?

Tim Sneath is an MS Vista Technical Evangelist, and I was reading his post on the WPF/E dev environment over the weekend. I was particularly interested, because I have a mac (with mono installed), and was wondering how I can get some wpf/e goodness going on this environemnt. Now if I am right, there's no luck here... is MS interested in having people develop for wpf/e on macs? Most geeks I know have mac book pros these days... I don't plan on getting vista installed, personally, but I would love to develop (or at least learn about wpf/e... in my current development env).

Anyway, a statement on Tim's post didn't quite sound right to me:

One difference that I'll call out is in the way each technology is embedded. Flash applets are distributed as .SWF files, which wrap all the resource and code information into a somewhat opaque (emphasis, mine) binary format. On the other hand, the goal for "WPF/E" is to complement HTML by providing a more transparent approach.

I think this is inaccurate, and I hope the language is not deliberate; you can find out more if you do a web search for "swf specification"; I think there are benefits in having a single swf file to deploy: it is convenient for all the assets that come together for your particular swf, the binary format allows for a smaller footprint and efficient delivery eventually, plus it is trivial anyway if your target is a binary. If you really want to share the source, nothing prevents you from zipping it up and making it available, anyway. If you are doing flex and you want to publish your souce code, well that is documented too. I am not a fan of the fla format/flash IDE though, which is why I am happy that mxml allows you to do swf source, declaratively, with plain text.

Judging from the response from the just-ended FOTB conference, people realize that ms has some really good tools for the web here. I don't know for myself. A fud campaign, however (and I hope it is not), will yield exactly the opposite of whatever the expectations are. Let the tools compete on their pure merits (if there indeed is overlap in capabilities), and do not set the baseline of developers for the platform to a windows OS.

cheers,
-- eokyere :)

Links:

WPF/E Developer Environment - http://tinyurl.com/y2vp7m
Publish Your Flex Source code - http://tinyurl.com/ued7o
SWF Specification Links - http://tinyurl.com/wlbea
FOTB - http://www.flashonthebeach.com/