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Comment by chipsy | Hacker News Reader

http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/demos The demos are basically graphics tests: vector drawing, frame-by-frame animation, tweens.

http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/swf-tag-support-ta... The tag support table shows just how much is missing: everything from SWF 2 onwards! Many of those tags aren't feasible in pure JS right now, anyway.

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Also, I think most of the newer SWF files have lots of actionscript bytecode which is something that Gordon probably can't handle unless they implement their own stack-based virtual machine and implement all of the mx.core set of libraries.

A custom virtual machine probably isn't necessary. There are plenty of flash decompilers which can emit AS3 source from bytecode — and since ActionScript 3.0 is basically the old ECMAScript 6 draft spec, it can be trivially downcompiled to plain old Javascript using Mascara (http://ecmascript4.com/). Ideally the conversion would take place on a server-side proxy, and its ouput would subsequently be cached, but it could theoretically be done on the client as well. Re-implementing the standard library remains a major issue, but certainly not insurmountable.

It would be possible (a bit slow though). This has already been done a few times with JS. For example, qBasic (http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=92) or even virtualizing a whole device like the gameboy (http://www.codebase.es/jsgb/).

Interesting. Those work nicely using Safari on my iPhone. Looks promising.

But on Chrome 4.0.288.1 dev moving the mouse over any of the animations crashes the tab.

The demos don't work at all in IE8.

also nothing with opera 10

I have the same experience with Chrome. Mousing over the animation crashes not only the active tab, but all of the tabs in the window.

All the demos work fine for me on the Chrome 4.0.288.1 dev.

Interesting. Works fine on 4.0.249.49.

works for me in Chromium 4.0.266.0

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