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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

#261

Post by dandare »

The Flash "editor" software was a work of a genius. The combination of vector graphics editor, symbol library, layers, animation tools and code was super powerful yet super approachable at the same time. I have learned AS2 just by toying with the examples. Over time I learned AS3, then HTML and TypeScript, in this order.

One more shout out to the vector graphics editor - the way you did boolean operations with shapes based on their color has not been bested since by any other editor.

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

#262

Post by mulmen »

bitwize wrote: post #197
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

The turn if the century really was a different time.

> boomer tech

Since we are talking about events ~25 years ago isn’t all of this “boomer tech” because the boomers were at the peak of their careers at the time? Aren’t they the ones that created, like, everything?

Seems like a strangely modern phrase to use to describe what is now ancient history.

Also I’m not that old but I already see the ageism in tech. I see ideas dismissed based on age rather than merit. The normalization of this type of derogatory language makes me uncomfortable.

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

#263

Post by unnouinceput »

Flash is dead and it's a good thing. Now, what I want next is for ActiveX to be just as dead. Not ignored, but pro-actively support for it on all browsers to be dead as well.

Why Flash is dead but ActiveX is still supported? It's a bigger risk than Flash from security point of view. I can, if I want, write a malware in ActiveX and feed it to visitors on my site if I see they have Windows as OS.

Now kill ActiveX just the same. My pet peeve!

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

#264

Post by auroranil »

wvenable wrote: post #200
jchw wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

> 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.

Indeed. The fact that Flash is proprietary meant that all browsers had to use the same software (up to versioning and OS API implementations) to run SWF files. Now with HTML5, developers now have to deal with differences between different browsers (Chromium/Safari/Firefox are the most popular ones).

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

#265

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

they say "distribute", not send. The truth is, you just put it on a web server with some rudimentary js, if required, and it works

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

#266

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

ActionScript was just like javascript, almost no additional skills needed

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

#267

Post by cblconfederate »

SWF was a threat to apple's and google's walled garden. Its death coincides with the high point of the new world order

HTML5/JS animations and video are a worldwide space heater in comparison. If HTML5 was any good, app stores would have ceased to exist

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

#268

Post by HeckFeck »

danShumway wrote: post #39
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…

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.…

As an avid Linux user, I can't help but agree with the core of your argument. Open is always better, especially for posterity.

But the aspect of Flash that hasn't been fully replicated by HTML5/JS/whatever is the fully integrated workflow. That took away much of the underlying woes with environments and configurations. All you did was install Flash, make your game or animation, and a SWF was produced. This ease of beginning surely was a springboard for so many creators and animators, like the Newgrounds community.

I'm also partial to the idea of not everything being done by the browser, and instead plugins specialising in their respective area. The effect of moving everything into the browser only contributes to the Google-led near monopolisation of rendering engines.

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

#269

Post by hombre_fatal »

chii wrote: post #228
irrational wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, someone just needs to rebuild Flash, but based on modern web standards. We don’t need “productive conversations”. We already had the ideal tool - Flash. Just make a feature by feature duplication of what Flash was.

That already exists - it's flash's creative suite from adobe, and it exports to html5/canvas. Now of course, it's harder to pirate since it's a subscription service now-a-days (like photoshop). I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.

> I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.

It's very hard for us to admit that something could just be a string of pure luck, like the brief moment where Flash, Newgrounds, and fighting stickmen were at the cultural epicenter.

In fact, we as engineers seem biased in the complete opposite direction when it comes to understanding social phenomena. Technical advantages and disadvantages do very little to explain the world and why people do things and why things catch on.

Whether or not HTML5 replicates "what mattered" about Flash does nothing to understand how Flash fell out of cultural hegemony because it's not what mattered about Flash. HTML5 can't do anything to roll back the clock and recreate the perfect storm responsible Flash culture.

I think Flash, like Javascript and Wordpress, was simply at the right place at the right time to take advantage of unique characteristics of the early internet that are very hard to quantify with confidence much less replicate or predict.

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

#270

Post by creata »

dandare wrote: post #261

The Flash "editor" software was a work of a genius. The combination of vector graphics editor, symbol library, layers, animation tools and code was super powerful yet super approachable at the same time. I have learned AS2 just by toying with the examples. Over time I learned AS3, then HTML and TypeScript, in this order. One more shout out to the vector graphics editor - the way you did boolean operations with shapes…

> the way you did boolean operations with shapes based on their color has not been bested since by any other editor.

Can you expand on this? How did it use colors to help us work with boolean operations on shapes?

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