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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

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Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#161

Post by tannhaeuser »

echelon wrote: post #83
breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

> I'm not deriding the web -- it's the last free and open space we have left in an ever-eroding tech land grab

No it isn't. It has degenerated into being only browsable in its entirety by Chrome, with all other "browser vendors" except Apple having given up due to sheer complexity and infeasibility to keep up - Opera, Microsoft, and now Firefox. That's what you get by putting Google (ie WHATWG, consisting of Chrome devs) into the role of defining so-called "web standards", with W3C (a self-declared "standardization body") depending on Google's and other big player's money having done nothing meaningful for years except brittling and foobaring CSS.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#164

Post by olau »

Marazan wrote: post #160
Sunspark wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are romanticizing Flash. One legitimate reason for it's eventual demise was due to the fact that it was very power hungry to run. On laptops that was bad, and on smartphones it would have been a non-starter. Though curiously, I remember that some smartphones did used to come with Flash like the Blackberry Z30 which had it through 10.2 and then it was taken away out of the hands of the device owners in 10.3

The Flash runtime was not power hungry. It was the terrible code that was written that ran on it that was power hungry. As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%. All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.

I never liked Flash, but the browsers were very far behind initially. Animation was slow and stuttering.

At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better.

But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#165

Post by grishka »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #101
grishka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh. For some reason I very much like the memes from that era, and I've seen this particular one for the first time.

Huh, interesting you don’t know that one. Memes had a bigger impact then: there were fewer of them, they were more unexpected (because they were newer), and in fact the word meme either did not exist or, if it did, it was certainly not in widespread use. Anyway: “ On June 1, 2006, YouTube was taken down temporarily for maintenance. The phrase "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" appeared below the YouTube logo as a plac…

The elusive kind of company that is run by engineers, not financial people. I miss these dearly.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#166

Post by abdusco »

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #152

In a certain sense, I created the very first Flash animation. I was working at Macromedia and happened to be in the office earlier than usual that morning. Our SVP came to my boss and said basically “We bought Futurewave, we’re announcing it today, and we’re renaming FutureSplash to Shockwave Flash. I need somebody to throw a quick animation together for the press gathering, and none of the creative services people a…

Unrelated, but is there a meaning to your username? Or is it just a random string?

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#167

Post by ehsankia »

p1mrx wrote: post #141
ehsankia wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most file types are not supported in browsers And does Google index/show any of them in a search result? You usually have to get them indirectly from pages, but the search links themselves never directly link to any unsupported file type AFAIK

I think you're right. Weird text formats like filetype:cpp work fine, but filetype:bmp does not, and that could be considered analogous to swf.

And even then I think only when it's being served with "content-type: text/plain", which the browser clearly supports.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#168

Post by blub »

breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. However, it's preservation to be able to run & archiving of flash media are an absolute cornerstone of any attempt to archive the 2000s internet. Flash introduced & inspired countless people who have no doubt gone on to build amazing things in other technologies. I love flash. I'm glad it's not used anymore, but I truly love the content it p…

You love Flash from the bottom of your heart, but you're happy it's dead? Could it be that you're hiding your true feelings to be more in line with the expectations of the community? The modern web development establishment has managed to convince people that it has merit, when in fact it's a case study in accidental complexity.

Every now and then some poor soul realizes what a mess they're in and writes a blog about the miserable state of web development, but the wider community cannot face the truth, because it would mean that the last 20 years of "progress" have been wasted.

And indeed, after two decades of support from every player in the industry, shoving countless APIs in the pseudo web standards controlled by Google, modern web applications work almost as well as a Flash app - except with thousands of tiny packages and tools cobbled together into one big ball of nonsense.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#169

Post by blub »

Sunspark wrote: post #143
echelon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flash as a technology should never be used now unless for artistic purposes. Nothing filled the gap left by Flash. It was easy, accessible, and drew so many young people to create. Flash had security issues, but they could have been fixed. Macromedia and/or Adobe could (and should) have published an open source standard and realized their tooling would always be ahead of the game. They didn't see the incredible opp…

You are romanticizing Flash. One legitimate reason for it's eventual demise was due to the fact that it was very power hungry to run. On laptops that was bad, and on smartphones it would have been a non-starter. Though curiously, I remember that some smartphones did used to come with Flash like the Blackberry Z30 which had it through 10.2 and then it was taken away out of the hands of the device owners in 10.3

The things that were trying to replace it (i.e. web standards) were even more power hungry to run or didn't work.

Re: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive

#170

Post by michaelt »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #137
etrabroline wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it was probably just one guy who had the authority to put that there without any threat of getting fired. Google today would set up a committee with diverse groups represented (including HR, PR and Legal) to focus test any and all potential "hate joke incidents" to ensure bland and inoffensiveness to all. The ongoing YouRube Rewind fiasco demonstrates this very well. I have to thank the Japanese for ha…

> The ongoing YouRube Rewind fiasco demonstrates this very well. Do you have a link for this? I’d like to read more about it. Searching for YT Rewind gave me the Wikipedia article and some scrubbed articles that don’t include stuff a out a fiasco.

I believe they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Rewind_2018:_Everyone_... a youtube video which youtube featured prominently on the front page and which received a lot of downvotes at the time.

Julia Alexander of The Verge suggested that YouTube had intentionally left out the biggest moments on the platform in 2018 from the video in an attempt to calm concerned advertisers over controversies that had plagued the platform over the past 2 years, saying "it's increasingly apparent, however, that YouTube is trying to sell a culture that's different from the one millions of people come to the platform for, and that's getting harder for both creators and fans to swallow".

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