There are STILL sites that have flash elements today. I’m looking at you HomeDepot and your Citi bank partner card.
HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
141–150 of 372 posts
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had…
Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iter…
AS3 was a great language.
It struck a perfect balance between static and dynamic typing, had all the OOP you wanted, but FP too.
Also, e4x and data binding in Flex was magical.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#143This is true but it is a common misunderstanding imo. Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime. So why doesn’t that tool exist? Well... as far as I know it does. I’m pretty sure this is…
Even for videos Flash was the best solution for a long time, almost every video sharing website used Flash video players until HTML5 video got developed.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#144The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…
Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.…
there wasn't really a mobile market to speak of during the hey-day of flash.
it was an awful and wonderful time to experience the constant breakage and delight that was the www.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".
When was the last time you saw a web app that was a single html file and nothing else?
Around the same time I saw a web app that was a single SWF file that you could email. I do see tech demos in that form factor though. Or at least they could easily be.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
In terms of sending a single SWF file to someone: The HTML equivalent would be to inline your CSS and Javascript, and use data URLs to inline images/assets. Now you have a single, self contained HTML file you can send around and it will "play" when you double click it. I suppose the point may be that no one has written a tool to package a HTML5 app up like that? Seems possible to build under certain constraints.
They have. It’s called Webpack. There are also various similar tools. EDIT: I got downvoted for telling the truth? The website is here if you don't believe me: https://webpack.js.org/ It literally does what the post I replied to asked for.
I've noticed an increase in upvote/downvotes based on whether or not a person agrees, rather than whether the comment was on-topic and contributed to the conversation.
I try to make a point of upvoting comments I disagree with, but that are clearly made in good faith in order to counteract this trend.
I suppose this problem is a normal low entropy state in community moderated systems.
It takes a lot more mental energy to moderate based on the value of the conversation rather than whether you personally agree.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#147Adobe screwed with the ActionScript (that one was catastrophe of a language), security and the tools, as each version of Adobe package until Cloud had increasing number of bugs.
But in defense to Flash, as I was using it long time ago, it was super easy to make animations, and drawing 2D animated characters, lines were smooth and even at the time without digital pen it look so natural. Adobe Illustrator was always more serious, and you needed to spend time fine grain adjusting Bézier curves, but in Flash that was one stroke of the hand I loved it. Also timeline and animation, was super user friendly, 15 years after there are few tools I have tried but none has that same easiness for artists.
Tool is the issue, and I can understand artists, HTML5 does not have any similar tools. And writing "HTML & CSS" and aiming at pixel coordinates is just not the way to do 15 minute (27000 frame) animation.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#148I've come across a lot of similar sentiment from ex-Flash devs, who romanticise its heyday as a period of fertile creativity (true) and say that HTML5/JS/CSS/SVG is an inadequate replacement (false). In truth, the fundamental capabilities of the modern web platform matches and typically exceeds anything that was offered by Flash. What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to…
I think the point you're missing is that Flash supported an entire ecosystem. Because it was easy to distribute the files (and steal them from other portals), there were tons of game portals out there competing for traffic. This competition created incentives to do special deals (add my logo and a link for $2k before you launch). I released several games sponsored by Kongregate which went viral and got distributed to thousands of portals. Higher-tier portals would reach out and purchase a site-locked version without their competitor's branding for an additional $300-$1k depending on if they had their own API for high scores and such. Because there were SO many portals, it wasn't as winner-take-all as the modern mobile marketplaces.
I could easily recreate my games in javascript today (or swift. or C#/unity. or whatever) from an "is this possible" point of view, but I think it's much harder to make money today. You could argue that's more due to the competition level and number of creators than Flash, but I think the siloed app stores are awful for the long tail and smaller developers.
That ramp-up of competition kind of happened even before Flash was dead-dead, though--the big portals existed in a time before Facebook games (which suck now but were amazing for awhile) and mobile games. It's wild now to see my kids (5 & 8) play a lot of online games on modern much-shittier-than-Kongregate-and-Newgrounds portals, but there's basically a short time period between "old enough to play games" and "old enough for their own phone or steam account" that they're in right now, and I suspect that audience isn't big enough to support the kind of innovation we saw before Facebook games (which were also made with Flash, for the most part!).
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#149This is true but it is a common misunderstanding imo. Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime. So why doesn’t that tool exist? Well... as far as I know it does. I’m pretty sure this is…
> Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime. The author doesn't argue a tool like Flash should exist. He just states the fact that HTML has still not caught up to fill the blank caused by…
If that’s their argument, it’s missing insight in my opinion. The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting, and in fact it’s full of undesirable problems. If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing. If you even just ignore Flash itself and include Flex, Haxe, and other authoring tools that can deal in flash runtime, it still isn’t that appealing.
These arguments get confusing because HTML, SVG and JavaScript are human readable and writeable. But that doesn’t mean the way someone should make animations in HTML5 is by typing coordinates into a text editor.
If there really is a gap in the web runtime that Flash fills, what is it?
Edit: also, I believe they are directly and indirectly arguing for the existence of such a tool:
> 1) For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file
> 2) You have a robust authoring tool that is animation/graphics-first and newbie friendly
The first one is 100% technically possible with tooling; though admittedly better embedding of assets would be nice. The second one is just literally directly asking for such a tool.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you not recall that flash was a the worst of the closed source rubbish. It never played well on any system I cared to use. The tools to generate it were unavailable to the likes of me and a lot of people here, who back in the day were second class citizens. Also it tried to make the the Web TV before there was anywhere enough processing power at the ends nor bandwidth in the middle. Designers on their expensive po…
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