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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

#241

Post by marcus_holmes »

larsiusprime wrote: post #86
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.…

> 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…

this is a vicious spiral, though - because the type of people who are interested in Flash can't use it on Linux, they don't run Linux and therefore there's no people who are into Flash and run Linux and so there's no need to support Linux.

The same is still true of a lot of other "niche" application areas.

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

#242

Post by dsego »

recursive wrote: post #80
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…

That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".

Not if it has local dependencies, like js or css, then you would need to bundle those as well, in an archive perhaps.

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

#243

Post by ksec »

danShumway wrote: post #219
chii wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously). If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations tha…

> then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our moder…

>Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash.

There are basically two camp of people. Those who use Flash, and stating HTML5 not as good as Flash are coming from a user, designer, creative point of view. Its ease of use, from coding to authoring. The simplicity of getting something done. Like HyperCard.

The other camp are programmers, software and web developers who just saw Flash and HTML from a technical perspective. Of course you can replicate 99% of Flash capability, but that was not the point. Since the first camp sort of rely on the 2nd camp to provide tooling. And the 2nd camp doesn't understand or care what they are missing. Nothing is being done.

Classic Software consultant and development problem.

Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?

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

#244

Post by krapp »

dsego wrote: post #242
recursive wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".

Not if it has local dependencies, like js or css, then you would need to bundle those as well, in an archive perhaps.

You can include js and css in the same html file, between and tags.

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

#245

Post by throwaways885 »

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…

> I disagree that Linux compatibility back then was a non-issue. It was not. It was a serious problem that held Linux back as a platform and as a daily driver and we all hated it, and it feels very dismissive to say that it was just a tiny side effect or that it's irrelevant to the broader point. Flash was never cross-platform and it held back the entire web from being a universally accessible platform. And it only got fixed because developers were forced to use a runtime that supported Linux. That is the only reason that Linux browsers are usable today.

More succinctly, it's unhealthy for any company to 'own' the web. The standards process we have today is far better.

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

#246

Post by udioron »

(From the thread: https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1344530847685369856 ):

    > 1) Because YOU didn't value something doesn't mean you understand all the ways it was valuable to others
    > 2) It's possible for technology to regress in big ways even as it moves forward in others, esp. when 1) applies
+ Google Reader (RIP 2013)

+ Google Music (RIP 2020)

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

#247

Post by pjmlp »

ksec wrote: post #232
pjmlp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Last time I was downvoted to oblivion for stating that. Not a popular view on HN for some strange reason. ( Along with no one use SSB on Desktop as with the Firefox thread. )

As you can see by my comment history, I stand by my point of view and never care for votes, regardless in what direction they go.

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

#248

Post by meheleventyone »

danShumway wrote: post #205
larsiusprime wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we've arrived at the same page here. I think we actually agree about most everything.

I do agree with everything you're saying about what's been lost, and I feel that loss because I went through that same loss. I'm not commenting from the sidelines, I lost Flash as a development platform too. I think my big frustration is that there's this tone that often comes up underneath threads like this that's, "look what the web took away from us", and I just think that's really harmful and inaccurate. All of t…

There are two prongs to the problem.

Web standards evolve slowly and compatibility is often even slower. Developers still can’t target WebGL2 on iOS for example and only just got it for desktop Safari. We’re basically getting to the point where the web is a viable platform for games although there are still significant performance differences between browsers. No one’s going to seriously build tools for a platform that’s very slowly coming together. But the future is brighter there now just not in a realistic timeframe for a Flash replacement to be made.

The expertise to build Flash didn’t actually come from games. The next Flash might not either. It was also a long journey if you look at the development history of what became Flash. Building something at this scale takes a lot of time.

Then at the same time the market changed and a lot of the web game eyeballs became mobile game eyeballs. Hence a lack of industry interest in rekindling web support.

On the plus side I work for a web based game development platform and work pretty much exclusively in Chrome all day building games for the web. Our aim is somewhat different to Flash but we’re in the same ballpark in terms of wanting to make development intuitive and fun.

In the broader scheme of things I think the next couple of years are going to be really interesting for web games in general.

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

#249

Post by danShumway »

ksec wrote: post #243
danShumway wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then why doesn't one already exist? I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform. Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our moder…

>Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash. There are basically two camp of people. Those who use Flash, and stating HTML5 not as good as Flash are coming from a user, designer, creative point of view. Its ease of use, from coding to authoring. The simplicity of getting something done. Like HyperCard. The other camp are programmers…

I used Flash, and I'm a programmer.

HTML5 is fine. The problem is the lack of tooling. That's what's letting me down as a user, designer, creative person. Not the web, the lack of tools.

But HTML5 can not fix that problem. Only the games industry can fix that problem. HTML5 is never going to be a game creation IDE, it's just an API and a set of technologies. Companies like Epic, Adobe, Unity, etc... have to step in and develop game IDEs that are comparable to Flash.

And they just haven't. I don't know why they haven't, people should ask them that question.

There's this idea that web advocates don't understand that web tooling for games is bad, and that's just not the case. As web advocates we do understand the problem, but Mozilla is not in a realistic position to build everyone a game engine. It's not something that browser-manufactures can do. It's something the games industry has to decide to tackle. Calling out the web is counterproductive, we are doing everything that we can do to help with replacing Flash.

> Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?

That would be great, but I wouldn't bet on it. The hope was originally that Adobe would migrate Flash to HTML5 canvas output. They never did until Flash was mostly dead, and from everything I've heard their new engines are kind of terrible to work with anyway.

The secondary hope was that they'd Open Source Flash, or at least help with emulating SWFs so people could continue to use old versions of Flash to publish to the web. That never happened either because... I don't know why. Maybe licensing issues, maybe Adobe just doesn't care about anyone in their user communities at all.

To see people giving tearful salutes to a company that literally just sat there and watched its product rot rather than do anything at all to help the community... it's just very frustrating. I was a Flash developer too. But I'm not mad at Open web advocates, there are plenty of other people/businesses for me to be mad at.

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

#250

Post by josefx »

recursive wrote: post #80
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…

That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".

With resources embedded in the highly "compressed" base64 encoding. Quite a few email services will probably block those html files just because they end up stupidly large unless your content is text only and doesn't include half a dozen java script frameworks to manage basic animations.
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