1. What is FluidHtml?
FluidHtml is a new markup language that was created to address many shortcomings of today's rich media authoring solutions. FluidHtml combines the rich media display attributes of Flash with the search benefits, SEM support, server support and ease of development of HTML.

2. Will my customers need to download and install anything to run FluidHtml?
No. The user does need to have Flash 10 installed, but 97%+ of all PCs already have this.

3. What are the key business benefits? There are many, but two key benefits commonly standout:

1. 1. Flash and other rich media authoring solutions produce rich Internet applications (RIAs) that are not searchable. With FluidHtml, you get the performance of Flash, but your site is now discoverable by search engines and that provides the first business benefit – free, organic search traffic.
2. 2. Similarly, before FluidHtml, RIAs were not deeplinkable. This means your marketing teams cannot drive truck enthusiast traffic to the trucks and sedan buyers to the sedans. They are forced instead to send all traffic to the home page. Thus, the second benefit: by adding support for deeplinking, you'll get higher return on investments in marketing.

4. How much does it cost?
FluidHtml is free to developers. Websites deploying FluidHtml will pay a tiered annual licensing fee according to the number of visits on the site. Pricing starts at less than under $100 per year for the world's majority of low-traffic sites. Pricing is also very low for enterprise level sites, and they should contact us for current pricing.

5. Does that include support?
For our self-service customers, (available soon) our website will provide complete documentation of the language, tutorials, examples and our question and answer forum. A beginner's guide to FluidHtml will also be available in mid November. Help desk support is available for an extra fee and is a standard feature of our enterprise agreements. Support is available for enterprise customers as part of our standard enterprise business model.

6. Does that include updates?
Yes. All updates are included under our annual license fee agreement.

7. Is FluidHtml open-source?
No. The core FluidHtml interpreter is not open-source. In January 2010, we will publish an open API that will allow developers to extend the language (ie, its tags and properties) These submissions are tested by the company, and if accepted, become part of the standard language. Community extensions are available for free to developers and included in the deployment license.

8. Can I evaluate the product free of charge?
There is no cost to developers to use the language, or to test and build development sites or applications. You pay nothing until you decide to move a site into production.

9. Do you need special training to be able to effectively use FluidHtml?
FluidHtml is structured like HTML and has been designed for very easy uptake by HTML developers. The website and our book provide developers with excellent self-serve training, documentation and support. For those that want hands on training, FluidHtml will start holding classes online in 2010.

10. Does FluidHtml require Flash programming in order to fully integrate a website?
No Flash development skills are required.

11. Do search engines have the ability to crawl FluidHtml?
Yes. FluidHtml is as searchable as HTML.

12. Which versions of Flash does FluidHtml support?
Versions 10 and up.

13. Will FluidHtml work with Adobe Air and the Open Screen Project?
FluidHtml will begin to support Adobe Air and OSP next year.

14. How do I send comments to your product team?
Please send comments to support@fluidhtml.com



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1. How is FluidHtml different from Flex? 
Flex is compiled and FluidHtml markup is interpreted client-side.  This means that Flex applications are not searchable whereas FluidHtml sites and applications can be searched just like HTML.

Also, creating dynamic applications and websites with FluidHtml mirrors the way developers have been doing things in HTML for years.  Developers can write server side code to generate pages on demand. So Java, PHP, Ruby, .NET and Python developers can all write FluidHtml in their native language.  

2. Can I mix HTML and FluidHtml on the same site or web page?
Yes, However, there are restrictions. Essentially, FluidHtml occupies its own “div” (and an infinite number of nested FluidHtml sub-divs) on the web page. This main div can take up the whole screen, or it can be a small div of any size, like an ad, within an HTML page. At this point you can only have one FluidHtml main div on a page – again with any number of FluidHtml child divs. This doesn't present a serious limitation, but we are working on allowing multiple main divs on the same page.

3. Can I have standard flash objects and FluidHtml on the same page?
Yes, you can nest Flash within FluidHtml.

4. Which IDEs do you support?
A free Fhtml plug-in for Eclipse that supports code completion and many other features is available from our website. But, as Fhtml is just text, you can use any text editor to edit it.

5. Does FluidHtml support RTMPE.
Yes.

6. What do you mean by the “web functionality of HTML?”
FluidHtml, like HTML, is generated dynamically by servers. Flash applications, on the other hand, are compiled applications that are deployed to the server in binary form. That has a number of important implications. First, search engines cannot see the code in a compiled app, but they can see FluidHtml markup. That makes FluidHtml apps fully search engine indexable. Second, as FluidHtml is generated dynamically , FluidHtml sites can have 1000s of pages built from assets in a CMS … like the normal web. These pages can be assembled based upon user data, input, changing of the seasons,… any computed element. Third, ordinary and important web functions like deeplinking, the “back” button and so forth … all work. Fourth, because FluidHtml is a markup language for Flash, it can be developed much more quickly and prototyped very easily Fifth, developers can now easily apply important concepts such as style sheets and theming to the development of rich media applications. This can be done with Flex, but it's difficult and the resulting app is still compiled, which more or less defeats the purpose.

7. What else is new or special?
We have addressed certain limitations of CSS with a new and improved, “liquid layout engine” that is more powerful and flexible than standard CSS.

We have also created an extensive and easy to use animation engine that makes it much easier to create animation and 3d effects.

And it is worth noting that while HTML suffers from inconsistencies and oddities across the various browsers that are a source of endless headaches for developers, since we use Flash to display, FluidHtml renders the same on common browsers.

8. FluidHtml uses an interpreter… won't that be slower than compiled Flash?
No. It takes our interpreter 50 milliseconds to parse data from XML strings, but all Flash apps do that too. All layout and animation operations run as fast as Flash can run them.

9. Does FluidHtml support Drupal and other common CMS technologies?
Yes. In fact our own website is built in FluidHtml with Drupal as our back-end CMS. This is quite easy to do, and we will have a downloadable code example available on our site in December. Also, our “FluidHtml T-Shirt Store” demo on our site is implemented in Drupal.

10. “Liquid Layout” has different meanings to different developers. What does it mean in FluidHtml?
FluidHtml allows developers to layout objects on a page in reference to each other. In addition, you can tell FluidHtml to scale child objects of a parent to scale proportionately when the parent object is resized. This means you can create website and applications that will look much better and scale dynamically regardless of the user's screen size or when it is resized. Further, FluidHtml intelligently maintains layout rules in the context of animations.

11. You say FluidHtml makes 3D easy. How is this done?
The basics are simple. Any 2D object made in FluidHtml can be projected onto a 3D primitive. These primatives can be animated just like 2D objects as well. In addition you can move these objects while animating in x-y-z coordinate space to provide the experience of depth to the viewer. This is all done within special “3D divs” within FluidHtml. See several of our 3D demos for examples. Our FSS style sheets work with 3D as well!

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1. What are the main advantages of FluidHtml for my enterprise?
The use of rich media, interactive web applications, and web animations are growing dramatically, and consumer expectations of their web experience with your company are rising as a result. In general this is called RIA – rich Internet applications, and it's here to stay. It's also been proven that richer web sites are more compelling and increase consumer engagement and retention.

Historically, committing to rich website development meant using Flash™ but this has significant problems for CIOs that FluidHtml solves. The main ones are these:

a. Flash developers are expensive. FluidHtml puts the power of Flash into the hands of your existing web developers because it follows HTML paradigms can easily be learned in a few weeks.

b. No one today would code a large website in Flash because it was never built for this purpose. Flash is compiled, so each page of your site is essentially a compiled application. This isn't true of HTML which can be dynamically generated on the server. Since FluidHtml is just markup on the page, it works like HTML With FluidHtml you can generate Flash pages dynamically just as you do HTML.

c.Flash does not lend itself to team-based development. Since Flash is not a structured language, no two developers do things the same way, and code is not easily sharable or re-usable. FluidHtml on the other hand is structured. This means code can be shared within teams, code libraries in FluidHtml can be developed for your enterprise or brands, and you can develop and maintain syle and animation libraries that are separate from FluidHtml code. This not only reduces development time and ensures consistency, but means that styles can be changed once and propagated throughout your site wherever they are referenced.

d. Flash has a difficult time with SEO. Because Flash is compiled, the search engines can't index these binary objects. Adobe is working on making this better, but there is a natural limit to what can be done. However, FluidHtml is just markup, so it can be indexed by the search engines just like HTML. This means you can develop in FluidHtml and get all the benefits of Flash without sacrificing search engine indexability.

The upshot of all this is that with FluidHtml, your enterprise can enjoy all of the benefits of rich web deployment while dramatically reducing the total cost of development and maintenance over conventional rich media tools like Flash and Flex.

2. Will you support me?
Yes. All of our enterprise customers have access to our company's experts for support.

3. Does it run the same in all browsers? Are special plug-ins required?
FluidHtml runs wherever Flash runs. We support Flash 10 and we will strive to remain backward compatible as our language evolves.

4. What will it cost me?
Enterprise customers pay a low annual licensing fee for the use of the language. Call us for current pricing. The language is free for your developers, so they can download the language, learn it, and build and test without any charge. To actually deploy public sites and applications in FluidHtml does require the language license we just mentioned. There are no other hidden costs to FluidHtml. There are no server licensing fees, no seat licenses or any other accessory fees.
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