Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different • Hacker News Board

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#161

Post by thekenwheeler » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:21 PM UTC

I remember way back when, when I first started on the web, I got paid to make Flash sites. It was a cringey time, but the capability and animation smoothness, on Windows XP, 8 years ago, was still better than you can get on the web on a Macbook Pro today.

When Jobs murdered flash I transitioned to web waiting for it to come up to parity, but it never did.

We've had incremental improvements, but IMO they have been scraps, and the priority is out of wack. Why are we adding MIDI to a platform that still can't efficiently do layout?

I recently gave a talk about building a new browser without the DOM, instead using native UI primitives driven by javascript for our sites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEQx3wz8QeY

Wherever we land, I just hope to someday get the kind of performance on the web that I got 8 years ago with Flash.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#162

Post by 0x0 » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:23 PM UTC

zwetan wrote: post #92

About the open source AVM2, there are in total 3 versions: The tamarin project on Mozilla mercurial with tamarin-central [0] and tamarin-redux [1] Then after the project got abandoned, Adobe renamed it to avmplus and moved it to github [2] and made a couple updates. Later on, they moved it to another repo [3], updated it on December 2015 to the equivalent of Flash Player v19.0 and updated it again on Mars 2016 to the…

Alchemy also required a per-domain license key to be purchased to unlock various API combinations at runtime. For me this was the biggest shock and definitively a hint that not all was well in flash land. Runtime player licenses were unheard of until then - only the authoring tools cost money. Having to pay up for every swf on every domain certainly put a chilling effect on experimentation around the new APIs.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#163

Post by hacksonx » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:38 PM UTC

Speaking of flash & it being used to build entire websites, this we hear made it hard to index those sites. I remember when I was at university, the university network didn't work with android devices because it worked over a proxy and Google/Android weren't fond of a proxy server because it prevented them from tracking the user. Lots of tools have died solely because they prevent bigger companies to flourish. Not saying Adobe aren't big but you know Google and Apple are massive.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#164

Post by tomelders » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:44 PM UTC

deniska wrote: post #133

tomelders wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

> Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? > Google Maps Here you go.

I'm fairly certain that Google Maps was Javascript from the beginning.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#165

Post by camus2 » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:44 PM UTC

I liked Flash and still think it is vastly superior to HTML5 when it comes to games or interactive experiments BUT Flash was a closed source, proprietary tech that was controlled by a single actor and not future proof. I understand now the dangers of such platforms and why the web should be free and open.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#166

Post by tomelders » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:47 PM UTC

Macha wrote: post #129

tomelders wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was anything "amazing" every created in Flash? It's obviously subjective, but things that would merit the "amazing" tag for me would be things like, Wikipedia, Google (the Search Engine), Facebook (love it or hate it, it's an awesome success), Google Maps, stuff like that. All I remember from the Flash days, and I was a flash developer bear in mind, was clunky, contentless, CPU hammering folly. None of which I think…

YouTube couldn't have started when it did without flash, even if it's moved on to html5 now. Also lots of indie game devs (e.g. team meat of super meat boy or binding of Isaac) got their start there, a lot of the early "upload your flash game here" might have paved the way for getting so many games on the app store model when it got going.

Had flash not existed, I suspect they would have used another video playback plugin, or rolled their own. I don't think YouTube's success was dependent on Flash. But the ubiquity of Flash certainly didn't hurt.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#167

Post by ghaff » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:51 PM UTC

graphitezepp wrote: post #158

graysonk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sidenote: But I don't understand why restaurant websites that I have seen are so bad. Is there a specific, prolific company that does these? The trend of restaurants around me is to just have a single png scan of their menu and nothing else. I was talking to one owner and they were wondering why their SEO was so bad

I strongly suspect it is as simple as restaurants tend to not have much money for anything that is not strictly operations related.

I think in context the parent was somewhat suggesting the opposite though. The websites for (higher-end) restaurants and hotels are often this mess of sliding images and pop-ups that can, among other things, make it almost impossible to do something simple like find the address, make a reservation, or look at the menu. And a lot of this was done in Flash at some point.

I suspect it just became a sort of arms race with everyone competing on sizzle rather than usability.

What you're describing is pretty much small businesses everywhere. Presumably this is a lot of Squarespace's target market.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#168

Post by stupidcar » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 12:52 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #138

elorant wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did…

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set.

If you want vector graphics, you have SVG. If you want imperative 2D graphics, you have Canvas. If you want 3D, you have WebGL. If you want video, you have the Video tag. If you want dynamic audio processing, you have the Web Audio API. If you want duplex, real-time or peer-to-peer communication, you have WebSockets and WebRTC. If you want client persistence, you have localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB. If you want complex layout, you have CSS Flexbox and CSS Grids. If you want dynamic caching, you have Service Workers. If you want parallelisation, you have Web Workers. You have APIs to create, upload and download files from scratch, to instantiate typed arrays and get byte-level access.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#169

Post by BaronSamedi » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:01 PM UTC

dyarosla wrote: post #37

code_duck wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authoring software was user friendly but sites made that way were atrocious in terms of usability in every way possible. Slow loading and also everything else about a browser didn't work as expected - bookmarking, back button, cut and paste, open in new window were all broken in flash sites. I don't think that it's laudable to create a tool that empowers beginners to create useless and difficult websites.

As a counterargument, look at the state of the web today without Flash. Many websites are still bloated, still slow to load, still hijack the back button, still mess with copy and paste, still force same-window-only opening. So was Flash really the issue?

Good point. Everything annoying and insecure about Flash and Java applets has been carried over into JavaScript. The root cause issue is the desire for client side execution of arbitrary code.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#170

Post by noxToken » Wed, Jul 19, 2017, 1:01 PM UTC

graysonk wrote: post #153

mattmanser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;) I actually think it didn't hurt…

Sidenote: But I don't understand why restaurant websites that I have seen are so bad. Is there a specific, prolific company that does these? The trend of restaurants around me is to just have a single png scan of their menu and nothing else. I was talking to one owner and they were wondering why their SEO was so bad

Unless its a national chain, the ones in my area are either building it from scratch or using a template. The made-from-scratch are painfully obvious in that they look like some high school student with a touch of experience cobbled it together. And that's probably what happened - the owners child or niece/nephew did it.

The template sites are obvious because the owners chose a feature-filled template with all of the bells and whistles but have no use case for all of the frills. There are empty carousels, tons of extra white space, empty link slots, and a halfway responsive mobile experience.

Considering the above, a static, zoom-able HQ image of the menu is not a bad option. It's not optimal, but it's not bad. It tells the restaurant's name, phone number, business hours (possibly), address (again possibly), plus the entire menu. That ticks all of the major boxes for information that a customer may need.