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HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

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Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#21

Post by imbnwa »

bmcahren wrote: post #3

Is he ranting that Adobe Animate doesn't exist? Because it does and seamlessly exports HTML. I'm pretty sure if they aren't already you could get a bundler configuration for webpack that would build a single file data uris and all.

I worked on porting a company's Flash library to Canvas, Animate is not that helpful here, it spits out an IIFE that calls into their CreateJs library but you just can't fire and forget because Canvas demands a lot of hand-tuning if you're doing anything other than banner ads to get the same performance profile and Animate won't help you do that work. This is particularly a problem with static images, text, opacity IIRC. Literally every tip you see on MDN for Canvas performance you will not get in that Animate Canvas output.

Jus as an example, Flash is able to redraw only whats needed on the screen whereas Canvas doesn't do this and works like a game where it blows away the whole screen every frame (assuming you're calling clearRect), hence why its best practice to use multiple Canvas elements, off-screen Canvas elements, etc but again, Animate doesn't do that work for you.

And up until the EOL of IE11 next summer you have to manually alter the output to make use of blend modes, which people use a lot of in Flash, if you want full browser support, which is pertinent in domains like healthcare.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#22

Post by est31 »

amelius wrote: post #8

> For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file You can do the same with HTML5+CSS+JavaScript, all in a single file. You can even include images, audio and video e.g. with data urls.

data urls encode things in base64 format so bloat up the file. Also the user agent can't just seek over them, requiring it to parse the entire included base64 content. There are better ways, but sadly nothing cross platform:

* https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webarchive

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#23

Post by ramraj07 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

I call a bit of BS about this. In the end, the code that creates js or HTML5 equivalent (poorer versions in fact) end up being far more resource intensive and buggy than flash was. Importantly, this is after millions of man hours were put into optimising the hell out of the js engines. Further, apple itself ended up optimising it's processor architecture to allow faster JS execution.

What would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn't made an ultimatum on Flash? The iPhone might have taken a few more iterations, but eventually they would have figured out how to support flash well in their phones. We might even be in a place where processors are designed to efficiently execute flash (the new M1 has so many specialization this is not even reaching out).

Instead what we have today is a mess of things that still don't add up to technology we had a decade back, and we have really bad, inefficient code running everywhere trying their best to emulate what flash did.

In the end, the reality is that Jobs made a tech forecasting mistake assuming HTML5 (not js) will eventually catch up with flash. It never did. As poor forecasting decisions go this is fairly reasonable, but we cannot move forward if we continue insisting that this was the best decision even in retrospect.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#24

Post by CyberDildonics »

larsiusprime wrote: post #16
CyberDildonics wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.

My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can. My point is that: The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level us…

The title says HTML5 but you seem to actually want better tools.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#25

Post by amelius »

est31 wrote: post #22
amelius wrote: post #8

> For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file You can do the same with HTML5+CSS+JavaScript, all in a single file. You can even include images, audio and video e.g. with data urls.

data urls encode things in base64 format so bloat up the file. Also the user agent can't just seek over them, requiring it to parse the entire included base64 content. There are better ways, but sadly nothing cross platform: * https://github.com/WICG/webpackage * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webarchive

I suppose you could write a small JavaScript library that handles seeking through series of binary blobs.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#26

Post by amelius »

larsiusprime wrote: post #15
amelius wrote: post #8

> For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file You can do the same with HTML5+CSS+JavaScript, all in a single file. You can even include images, audio and video e.g. with data urls.

You certainly CAN. My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it. Likewise, you could split up a Flash file into as much spaghetti as you wanted. But most of them were single SWF files. Honestly, I think efforts like FlashPoint will have a better time archiving flash content for this reason than trying to preserve HTML5 content of today.

> My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it.

It could easily become a standard if someone writes a convenient JavaScript library or composer tool to do exactly that. My point is that the underlying platform is not the limitation.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#27

Post by devwastaken »

The proof is in the pudding. Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs.

Luckily browsers don't matter, and newgrounds has their own flash player you can launch content with.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#29

Post by stefan_ »

devwastaken wrote: post #27

The proof is in the pudding. Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs. Luckily browsers don't matter, and newgrounds has their own flash player you can launch content with.

Well the state of art seems to be scroll wheel operated slideshows. I'm still not sure if that is just one gigantic troll because HTML5 is such a trash platform or if people truly believe that's how you should present content. It probably started as the former and morphed into the latter.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#30

Post by epistasis »

larsiusprime wrote: post #17
ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

100% agreed. The one ultimately responsible for Flash's death was Adobe, who neither felt it was worth investing in to overcome these issues, nor worth open sourcing to let the community give it a try. What a loss.

Remember when Adobe added Flash content to PDF? That's just how little they understood the technology they owned.
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