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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

#91

Post by naikrovek »

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.…

> 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.

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

#92

Post by naikrovek »

the8472 wrote: post #41
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…

> but that's not how people really used Flash 4chan's /f/ would disagree, they're posting stand-alone flash games and animations just fine and those also worked locally.

Yeah I remember clicking on .swf files in directory listings over FTP almost 20 years ago and seeing the animation or game load up in the browser like no big deal. It was a great way to share and discover weird as hell flash animations.

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

#93

Post by stupidcar »

8organicbits wrote: post #81
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 terms of sending a single SWF file to someone: The HTML equivalent would be to inline your CSS and Javascript, and use data URLs to inline images/assets. Now you have a single, self contained HTML file you can send around and it will "play" when you double click it. I suppose the point may be that no one has written a tool to package a HTML5 app up like that? Seems possible to build under certain constraints.

They have. It’s called Webpack. There are also various similar tools.

EDIT: I got downvoted for telling the truth? The website is here if you don't believe me: https://webpack.js.org/ It literally does what the post I replied to asked for.

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

#94

Post by larsiusprime »

emptyparadise wrote: post #83

There's no HTML5 Newgrounds. It's a true shame.

There is actually, it's called Newgrounds :)

Not everything is converted over, but they're actively supporting the Ruffle.js project and using it on site: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

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

#95

Post by larsiusprime »

danShumway wrote: post #71
larsiusprime wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good point. It PAINS me that when somebody wants to upload a friggin' cartoon on the internet they have to render it out to 100X the native size and introduce compression artifacts. We were more sophisticated than this in 1999!

I mean, it's kind of crazy to think about, but forget distribution and even games entirely for a sec. What is the current standard for making vector animations, just in general? There isn't one. Why ? Flash clearly showed that people like to make animations with vector art. It compresses well, you can do nice things with scaling. And independent of everything else, there just isn't a clear best tool for that today. I…

This is the real tragedy. Games have clearly found a way to persist but animation is out in the cold and there's no good reason for it.

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

#96

Post by tomc1985 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #23
ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

I call a bit of BS about this. In the end, the code that creates js or HTML5 equivalent (poorer versions in fact) end up being far more resource intensive and buggy than flash was. Importantly, this is after millions of man hours were put into optimising the hell out of the js engines. Further, apple itself ended up optimising it's processor architecture to allow faster JS execution. What would have happened if Steve…

I had a Samsung Blackjack running Windows Mobile and it supported Flash, and anything Flash ran like absolute ass, even in LQ mode

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

#97

Post by naikrovek »

jcfields wrote: post #19
ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

My experience was that Flash ran like garbage on anything but Windows/Intel. Linux/Intel? Trash. Mac/PPC? Trash. The web at the time was unusable on my PowerBook G4 without FlashBlock. Maybe Flash would still be around if Adobe bothered to make it run well on anything but one platform.

Well the SWF file format was (is maybe still) available and Adobe publish(ed) the spec with no strings attached.

No one wanted to do it.

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

#98

Post by ineedasername »

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 practice it wasn't too uncommon for a single web page to also be a constellation different interdependent swf files. One for each menu, button, forms, etc.

The author's points hold true at least somewhat if you're talking about a single cohesive Flash application, but much less so if you're talking about a website built with flash.

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

#100

Post by tomc1985 »

mtmail wrote: post #2

Why didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR take off as successor to Flash? It is available for all platforms, runs ActionScript.

AIR apps were the Electron of its day -- slow, poorly-written HTML/CSS/JS (well technically AS but linguistically similar enough) garbage, which reuse exactly zero of the affordances your OS grants you, on top of a runtime that was waaaay too fat for its own good.

Mercifully, I only had to interact with a few AIR apps, and by god it was a terrible experience. The platform itself may have been fine but it was definitely the target platform for people who think of dev teams as cost centers and not value creators.

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