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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

#161

Post by codeyperson »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #42
nicolas_t wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools and that the tools for flash were refined and easy to use for a lot of people who were not necessarily deeply technical.

HTML5 is just the technology, so saying it doesn't replicate flash's tools is not reasonable.

You’re missing his point which he has stated very plainly in the first sentence of the message you’re replying to:

> The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools

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

#162

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

dimmke wrote: post #132
olyjohn wrote: post #11

The 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…

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…

That #1 on the list is SWF as a single file is really, really stupid. People can author standalone SVG or embed their scripts directly into HTML, they just choose not to. About half the problems of modern Web development practices are not that such-and-such makes something impossible, it's that people pass up what's possible (even what's sensible) in favor of the monkey-see-monkey-do style of development that involves dumping Dockerized Webpack Babel Rollup TypeScript Bazel React projects transpiled from Clojured Elixir onto GitHub with three quarters of a gigabyte of NPM dependencies.

It's nonsense to say that "HTML5/JS has [...] gotten worse". It's not a vendor SDK where platform version X doesn't support feature from version because the platform hired a new head of the design team who wants to shake things up by ditching the previous gen for the new shiny that you have to use instead. Web platform standardization is additive. If the new stuff sucks, don't use it, and keep doing things the "old" way. Don't do dumb stuff like trying to stay on the bleeding edge for no good reason and then complain when you get cut.

It's also a total contradiction to double back after all of this and try to claim that HTML5/JS is "programmer-centric". To go further and say that "Flash was content-first" is something all on its own. Standard web tech is content-first in a way that Flash never was, or more accurately, it's user-first. Flash on the other hand was always creator-first, prioritizing authors'/designers' pixel-perfect vision over users and accessibility, and the tacit endorsement of the worldview that the ends justify the means and that it's okay to favor blobs over, you know, content—which is ironically exactly what's wrong with the current world of SPAs driven by inscrutable minified bundles on the order of megabytes just to do something like put half a dozen form controls on a page that still doesn't manage state correctly.

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

#163

Post by vinay_ys »

SimianLogic wrote: post #140
dimmke wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

One could argue we have more games today and they are more richly animated and more complex than it ever was and they have better reach to more number of users (with iOS / Android) than ever before.

So from a user's standpoint, things have become better not worse – they don't have to compromise security or accept horrible battery life in doing so.

From the developer's standpoint, things have improved too – they don't have to depend on niche toolchains and they have better monetization options today than ever before. For small game studios it is easier to find mainstream developers who can do game development rather than only those willing to master niche toolchains.

The side-effect of using mainstream toolchains is it has more moving parts and hence has more complexity (that is unnecessary at a solo developer scale).

I agree that the learning curve has become harder a creative arts designer who wants to be a solo game developer to express their creativity.

So maybe the real question is what are the accessible mediums in which creative digital artists put out their hobby/amateur work today?

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

#164

Post by larsiusprime »

dimmke wrote: post #159
jakelazaroff wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are all the new games and animations, then? They used to be everywhere . People stopped making them because the tooling went away.

I think that stuff was on its way out before Flash's general demise. I think people (let's be honest, mostly kids) seeking that sort of content now will download games on their phone and watch YouTube/TikTok. They're probably on a phone/tablet instead of sitting at a desktop anyways. It could be a combination of both - the tooling for creating that stuff with just JS/HTML is not as good and the diminished demand prev…

It was ecosystem collapse; I saw it happen. The flash portals were kept afloat by an enormous amount of advertisement money that flowed through flash portals and to game developers and animators through sponsorships and site-licenses (make free content and get paid to do it!). As content moved to the mobile app stores this money dried up, and with it the entire ecosystem.

The simple format made it easy to upload content both for the portal and the developer. The tools made it easy to get started and to grow. The funding made it easy to start, find your footing, and stick around long enough to get good and eventually great.

As the format was attacked and HTML5 didn't work well with the old tools, and as Steve Jobs pushed app stores forward, it all came crashing down.

I saw it happen in real time, these forces evolved together.

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

#165

Post by heavyset_go »

olyjohn wrote: post #11

The 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…

In the early days, people would share Flash projects as .EXE files, and those would "just work".

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

#166

Post by viraptor »

rickyc091 wrote: post #34

The closest thing I ever found to Flash was https://scratch.mit.edu . You can draw vector graphics and attach code onto the individual sprites. It has the concepts of scenes as well, but no where near the power of what Flash had to offer.

Scratch is really for learning. There's no good way to create serious distributable results or version/manage/reuse scratch code. It provides a very basic Newgrounds alternative for young kids, but not much more.

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

#167

Post by qalmakka »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #155
danShumway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?). And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architectur…

I remember configuring NSPluginWrapper in order to get the 32 bit Flash plugin to work on 64 bit Linux (and FreeBSD). God that was nasty, as soon as YouTube launched the html5 beta I erased Flash player from every device I owned.

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

#168

Post by shawnz »

tapirl wrote: post #121
jchw wrote: post #75

This 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…

The author argues that a tool like Flash the authoring software should exist, but makes no argument about Flash the runtime.

An authoring software just like Flash could exist for the HTML runtime -- it isn't the nature of HTML which is the problem. Thus it's not HTML which has to "catch up", but vendors of authoring software.

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

#169

Post by zapzupnz »

naikrovek wrote: post #91
danShumway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed What? Literally everyone who downloaded the flash plugin and ran the installer got a standalone player installed as well. It was right there in the start menu for anyone to find.

That very much depended on how they installed Flash. If they downloaded the plugin via the Adobe website, it depended on whether you got the ActiveX control version or the Netscape version. For computers in more recent memory, you didn’t need either: just a copy of Chrome set as your default browser.

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

#170

Post by Dylan16807 »

codeyperson wrote: post #161
CyberDildonics wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML5 is just the technology, so saying it doesn't replicate flash's tools is not reasonable.

You’re missing his point which he has stated very plainly in the first sentence of the message you’re replying to: > The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools

Disagreeing, not missing.

The lack of this specific kind of tooling and community is a clear problem. But is "HTML5" a foundational cause of the problem, or is it a scapegoat? People can legitimately disagree.

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