Standards are supposed to be ‘boring’ and formalized but once in a while, we get some very colourful language. The Adobe – Apple debate has been getting a lot of coverage but last week, we reached new heights when Opera joined in the debate and said:

“At Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology.”

Which is fine… But then added :

Battery life suffers, CPU usage is overwhelmed, and “you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.”

That is certainly a graphic image (cooking an egg on a phone which gets too hot!) and it got the press coverage… But is it accurate?

Colourful as the image is, I think not.

‘Standard’ is not ‘code’ i.e. you could, in principle, ‘follow standards’ but implement them inefficiently and cause the device to heat up. There are a whole range of other factors (example network efficiency) that impact the issue. So, there is no correlation between ‘following standards’ and ‘implementation efficiency’.

You could just as easily create inefficient code if you follow standards.

But full marks for emotive imagery!