HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by nemothekid » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #120

I'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…

The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards.

What? The Flash authorship tools were definitely not free. I remember Macromedia Studio used to cost nearly a grand. They were widely spread because, like Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe didn't bother cracking down on piracy.

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

#192

Post by bfung » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #179

bitwize wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Flash only ever worked properly if you were running it in Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9. Any other browser/OS combination and you were looking at low framerates, audio/video desync, or both. Linux was worst of all.

that is such a weird OS + browser combination I have to take your comment as sarcasm, but the rest of the comment seems sincere enough.

That’s not sarcasm. As computer lab support back in college, iMac G3’s were the rage and the internet was new. The only working browser back in the day on those macs were IE. Good luck getting Netscape Navigator running on them (Phoenix/Firefox not created yet, Safari wasn’t even a thing yet).

Flash was the worst thing to support in those labs - some windows machines, some macs, some Solaris... gl trying to tell non-CS majors to move to a different computer...

I’ll admit, the authoring tools were great, everything else about flash was terrible.

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

#193

Post by axegon_ » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

I played a lot with flash back in the day when it was still macromedia flash and flash 4 and 5 to be specific. Mind you, I was 10-12 years old at the time so my current opinion would be somewhat skewed for obvious reasons. That said, I think flash had a few very good things about it. First off the fact that it could spit out windows executables natively was brilliant. Second it was perfect for 2d games and in-browser games. Nothing comes even close to it even today. But from a developer prospective, I think it had one fundamental flaw(from my point of view today): it never made a clear distinction between developers and designers. And even though ActionScript was based on the abomination that is js, from what I remember of it, it was a significantly better thought out language.

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

#194

Post by gorgoiler » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:43 AM UTC

YouTube (specifically hobbyist YouTube) replaced Flash.

As a nascent carpenter, baker, cosmologist and cycle repair guy I couldn’t be happier with the amount of freely available creative output people are sharing. Videos are this generation’s single-file-upload one-click-share platform.

I sure hope — for cultures sake — this generation also has an indie animation scene.

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

#195

Post by mkl » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

nanodeath wrote: post #104

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…

IIRC one of Chrome's various selling points when it launched was that Flash was bundled in, so 1. you always had Flash and 2. the plugin was more likely to be properly compatible with the browser, and 3. because Chrome updated constantly, that means you got updated Flash, too. So they definitely were trying to address that glaring pain point you brought up.

Plus Chrome's multiprocess model and sandboxing meant when Flash crashed you'd lose a tab or two instead of the whole browser. Before that I used to have browser profiles (and sometimes a whole browser) just dedicated to the fragile buggy Flash plugin, which wasn't installed on my primary browser.

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

#196

Post by Joeri » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:58 AM UTC

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…

I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.

That is for me the right way to frame it. Both flash and the web lost out to mobile. Neither managed to get a sufficient foothold there, and in practice people’s primary computing experience is now through fully proprietary apps distributed through vendor-controlled walled garden app stores.

The technical qualities of the underlying platforms didn’t matter all that much. Mobile platform vendors have control, and they made sure native apps made with their tools distributed through their store was the easier path. Apple could have improved safari’s progressive web apps ability to the point that it became a feasible alternative to making native iOS apps, but they didn’t, so people simply stopped trying to shoehorn web apps onto mobile platforms.

Apple didn’t kill flash to replace it with html5, they killed it to replace it with their own proprietary tech. I’m not sure they intended it that way, but they definitely intend to keep it that way (witness for example how web notifications are in safari on desktop but not mobile).

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

#197

Post by bitwize » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 7:59 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #179

bitwize wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Flash only ever worked properly if you were running it in Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9. Any other browser/OS combination and you were looking at low framerates, audio/video desync, or both. Linux was worst of all.

that is such a weird OS + browser combination I have to take your comment as sarcasm, but the rest of the comment seems sincere enough.

No, not sarcasm at all. I tried Flash on a variety of different operating systems and browsers at the time -- and IE5 on Mac OS 9 was the only one that consistently delivered good results.

It seems weird, but when you consider the context at the time, it makes sense. Back in the late 90s -- when Flash was on the rise and being rapidly developed -- IE5 was the browser to have on Mac just as it was on Windows. The reasons had to do with the infusion of cash from Microsoft into Apple to keep the latter company afloat while Jobs restructured it and pivoted it to Mac OS X. At the time, companies such as Adobe and Macromedia -- which hadn't been acquired by Adobe yet -- developed and tested on Mac first and most extensively, because they catered to the design crowd. As for browsers -- Safari wasn't around yet, Netscape was boomer tech by that time, Mozilla was broken, and Firefox wouldn't come out for a couple years. That really left only IE and boutique browsers like CyberDog and iCab. So the environment that got the most thorough testing was -- once again -- IE on Mac OS 9.

When Mac OS X finally did come out, it would take a number of years for Mac developers to fully embrace it. Remember, to the Mac teams inside Adobe and Macromedia, Inside Macintosh was the fucking Bible. Classic Mac OS was The Right Thing; Mac OS X was something weird and wrong and inherently anti-Mac, as parts of it came from Unix, which was known for having user-hostility baked into its design philosophy. It was also the future, but it was a future they'd take years to reckon with. So, for a while, the native OS X version of Flash chugged no matter which browser you used it in. Meanwhile, IE5 for Mac OS 9 still worked perfectly well provided you launched the Classic environment, so if you wanted top Flash performance it was still available.

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

#198

Post by k_sze » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #181

fny wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And now that's a proprietary authoring tool, again.

Back then, one of the arguments against Flash was that it was closed and proprietary, both authoring- and runtime-wise. Browsers nowadays are arguably open-source runtimes, but we still don't have a good open-source authoring tool that replicates the magic of Flash.

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

#199

Post by forgotmypw17 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

I love me some Flash games, and sad to see Flash go.

I must disagree on one point here: accessibility.

In HTML, accessibility is built in, and you have to do some stupid shit to break it, e.g. using divs and spans combined with CSS for fake "links". Many succeed, even Google has some on their search results pages, but it's not the default state.

In Flash, accessibility is barely an afterthought by default, and if you care about it, you have to work your ass off basically re-implementing the whole thing by yourself.

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

#200

Post by wvenable » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #149

tapirl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be…

> 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.

The runtime and the tooling go together. The reason why tooling doesn't exist for HTML5, SVG, and Javascript is it's just so damn complex and fiddly that it's impossible to paper-over and abstract with a robust authoring tool. Both sides of Flash were designed for the ease of this kind of development.

There hasn't been a good high-level authoring tool for HTML in decades and the situation is getting worse, not better.