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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

#181

Post by chrisco255 »

fny wrote: post #174
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…

So Flash and HTML/JS are how I got into programming at the age of 8, and I completely disagree with your comment. All I needed to do was export the flash document as an exe and boom: it worked. The portability was amazing. I would just cut a release, put it on floppies, and take them to school. I never had anyone complain once about having an issue. Oh, and no one gave a damn about Linux outside of server admins back…

Adobe moved right on to supporting HTML5 in their Adobe Animate tool: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht...

The support for using simple tools to make HTML5 animations and interactive content has been there for years (since at least 2013, when CreateJS was released: https://www.createjs.com/ ))

Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

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

#182

Post by slmjkdbtl »

HTML5 itself actually didn't fail on all these things, it's just the way people use it gave up some of these features to achieve different goals.

1) I've been practicing a rule that all the web content I make can all be downloaded fully by a single cmd+s save command and fully runnable locally. It's extremely easy to do, just unpopular.

2) HTML5 does not contain any spec for tools. If you think HTML5 doesn't have great tools then it's the community you should blame. Personally I just use a text editors and some helper functions for all my needs. But I agree there's no popular + good non-code tools.

The only thing is that browser is much more bloated than flash runners, but at the same time you can say it's lighter than a 3kb binary cuz everyone has a browser installed on their device, but all flash download prompts legitimate or not all look like malware (speaking of which I'm curious how flash download prompts became such a phenomenon in phishing would appreciate some quick links).

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

#183

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

onion2k wrote: post #177
kaslai wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, it has always cost roughly as much as Photoshop during Adobe ownership. That is to say: prior to the Adobe CC pricing model, Flash cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a quick spot check on Archive.org and it looks like "Flash Professional 8" had a retail price of $700 in 2006. $20/mo is definitely a lower barrier to entry than a one-off $700 payment.

A rep from Adobe once told me that about 90% of Photoshop installs were pirated (this was around 2002). I'd bet that a similar amount of Flash content was made using pirated copies of Flash.

Flash content on sites like AlbinoBlackSheep and the like, sure - but can you put a price on culture?

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

#185

Post by hypertele-Xii »

kaslai wrote: post #138
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe Animate costs 20$/month. I don't recall exactly how much Flash cost, but it sure wasn't that much. The barrier to entry is higher, thus popularity wanes.

If I recall correctly, it has always cost roughly as much as Photoshop during Adobe ownership. That is to say: prior to the Adobe CC pricing model, Flash cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a quick spot check on Archive.org and it looks like "Flash Professional 8" had a retail price of $700 in 2006. $20/mo is definitely a lower barrier to entry than a one-off $700 payment.

Really? All those kids making those stick figure animations on the early web sites had access to 700$ software? Sounds amazing.

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

#186

Post by pjmlp »

danShumway wrote: post #111
larsiusprime wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. C'mon I never emailed people SWF's, seriously. We uploaded them to flash portals and sent links to our friends. The single-file aspect was important because it made it easy to share (for both you and the flash portal). Also crucially it made it easy for competing flash portals to "steal" your game and spread it even further. > as someone who uses Linux…

> but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting Well, but... yeah. I know people weren't targeting Linux in the early 2000's, that was the problem. That's what I'm saying. One of the biggest advantages of dumping Flash was that it got replaced with a runtime that worked on every OS even if people weren't deliberately targeting it. I'm saying that's a big enough advantage…

The same audience still doesn't matter today, because most just use GPUs with drivers that get black listed by browsers, making WebGL useless.

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

#187

Post by riffraff »

dimmke wrote: post #151
SimianLogic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy. Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire website…

> When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now

Where we are now is that the lock in is so wide that basically everyone is running Chrome, including its competitors.

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

#188

Post by orthonormal »

This is, in some sense, like comparing a factory to a product. HTML5 is the barebones of technological tools necessary to build something that does what flash can do, not the flash itself. Being content-first is up to YOUR SDK, not HTML5. Regarding single-file apps, when did the ability to use inline scripts and style vanish? Nothing prevents a tool to generate genuinely cross-platform "single-file" htmls.

Don't blame HTML5 for the fact that no one bothered to make a content-first studio out of it.

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

#189

Post by dingaling »

spyder wrote: post #143
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…

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.

All that 'HTML 5 video' did was move responsibility for the media player from an extension and into the browser, and wrap it in standard markup.

So ironically the designer no longer just asks 'is Flash available on this platform?' but instead 'which codecs are available on this browser and platform?'.

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

#190

Post by gorgoiler »

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 context of the tweet thread’s list the author meant that (1) Flash web deploys were a single file and (3) distribution was with a single URL, which could be emailed.
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