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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Flash is that at some point people started using it to build websites. And then all hell broke loose. You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities, and a variety of other issues that made the whole experience pretty lame. So while Flash did indeed offered some unique capabilities in a friendly and frictionless package, it also hurt the web in so many ways.

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This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;)

I actually think it didn't hurt the web, it was a massive driver for change, Flash highlighted the lack of functionality in html/js and was part of the reason that forced html to finally get canvas, etc.

If you're completely honest with yourself, you'll realise that html/js are still years behind what you can do in Silverlight and Adobe Air.

Now it's mobile apps that are forcing the web to carry on evolving and highlight just how backward html/js is. In years time we'll have people saying that phone specific apps were terrible, but in reality, without something to show us the flaws of html/js are, it wouldn't move forward.

Personally I'm no fan of the mono-culture of the web, the idea that you can only use one language, either for markup or for programming, should be anathema to all of us and instead it is bizarrely celebrated. I'd far prefer to be using Python or Ruby or whatever than javascript and in reality I think it's probably costing the world billions or trillions in wasted effort as we schlep around with javascript.

Somewhen around 2005 many bands had Flash websites. And this is pretty much the last time I've seen full blown Flash websites.

The only thing I'm using Flash now any more is watching videos. Where I'm living it is sadly still the standard for some TV stations video websites.

Sidenote: But I don't understand why restaurant websites that I have seen are so bad. Is there a specific, prolific company that does these?

The trend of restaurants around me is to just have a single png scan of their menu and nothing else. I was talking to one owner and they were wondering why their SEO was so bad

I strongly suspect it is as simple as restaurants tend to not have much money for anything that is not strictly operations related.

I think in context the parent was somewhat suggesting the opposite though. The websites for (higher-end) restaurants and hotels are often this mess of sliding images and pop-ups that can, among other things, make it almost impossible to do something simple like find the address, make a reservation, or look at the menu. And a lot of this was done in Flash at some point.

I suspect it just became a sort of arms race with everyone competing on sizzle rather than usability.

What you're describing is pretty much small businesses everywhere. Presumably this is a lot of Squarespace's target market.

Unless its a national chain, the ones in my area are either building it from scratch or using a template. The made-from-scratch are painfully obvious in that they look like some high school student with a touch of experience cobbled it together. And that's probably what happened - the owners child or niece/nephew did it.

The template sites are obvious because the owners chose a feature-filled template with all of the bells and whistles but have no use case for all of the frills. There are empty carousels, tons of extra white space, empty link slots, and a halfway responsive mobile experience.

Considering the above, a static, zoom-able HQ image of the menu is not a bad option. It's not optimal, but it's not bad. It tells the restaurant's name, phone number, business hours (possibly), address (again possibly), plus the entire menu. That ticks all of the major boxes for information that a customer may need.

I spent a year building a pretty complex Silverlight app (which was then abandoned after Microsoft announced they were killing it) and you're wrong. Modern HTML/JS/CSS, when combined with a decent component framework, is more powerful. You seem to be yet another developer with chip on your shoulder about JavaScript, but you shouldn't let your prejudices blind to the reality of the web's current feature set.

If you want vector graphics, you have SVG. If you want imperative 2D graphics, you have Canvas. If you want 3D, you have WebGL. If you want video, you have the Video tag. If you want dynamic audio processing, you have the Web Audio API. If you want duplex, real-time or peer-to-peer communication, you have WebSockets and WebRTC. If you want client persistence, you have localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB. If you want complex layout, you have CSS Flexbox and CSS Grids. If you want dynamic caching, you have Service Workers. If you want parallelisation, you have Web Workers. You have APIs to create, upload and download files from scratch, to instantiate typed arrays and get byte-level access.

This. This is why I'm thankful to be a developer/designer at this time in the web's history. Browser support for features that I need to make a cohesive user experience has never been better!

I have a lot of gratitude to google, mozilla (and even Microsoft and Apple, as they come around to it) for making my job easier/possible.

You forget that Flash was a complete, well-rounded development environment, not just a language. It's a difference between Unity and e.g. writing your own solution in C++. The later is certainly way more powerful and gives you a lot more choices and freedom, but it takes a lot of effort and testing and learning to build a really productive tech stack and workflow that way. The same thing with HTML/JS/CSS. So many frameworks to choose from, IDE's have only very basic support for them, documentation sucks (if any), no good visual tools for animation, takes a lots of steps to push data from one tool to another (exporting/importing, converting different formats, etc.), you need to install a dozen of different tools and frameworks and then you still need to code a lot of basic stuff yourself. On the other hand Tools like Unity or Flash give you all you need in a single box, all perfectly integrated to work together, documented, you can just jump right into making things.

It's the same thing that Delphi & Visual Studio did for modern programming. If you were used to working in Turbo Pascal/C and switched to Delphi, it was just amazing what a productive boost you'd experience from having a true integrated development environment with all the little tools and drag&drop builders and ready-made components.

"Tools are for pussies - I only code in vim."

All jest aside - it's true that Flash is way more productive than the "true" web environment today. It has its drawbacks, but developer tooling was awesome.

All the things you list have terrible APIs, poorly thought out mechanics, mish-mashes of design philosophies. I've built silverlight apps and js ones and I disagree that html/js, even if you can use the bleeding edge, is anywhere near as powerful.

I may dislike javascript, sure, but it doesn't make me any less right that it's stupid that we still have no choice but to program in a particular language in today's effective OS, the browser. I generally use typescript now, but it's still rubbish compared to C# or Ruby or Python or [insert your favourite language]. And I feel the inanity of the present build infrastructure that we end up having to use is such an utter waste of my life.

Just think how much you'd chafe if you were forced to use a language you thought was substandard for 30% of your development time and waste hours or days every now and then wrestling build problems that I shouldn't even be thinking about it.

I certainly don't feel it's a chip, I think it's a perfectly sane response.

> If you want client persistence, you have localStorage, sessionStorage and IndexedDB.

I really wish that we had a persistent, non-ephemeral web api for local storage. One that has to be manually deleted by the user, searchable by domain, just like a mobile app. It should ask you to allow it just like notifications or webcam usage, and allow you to set a maximum size with a reasonable fallback default. Until we have that, and full support for service worker features, mobile apps will be a necessity for many developers unfortunately.

There were a lot of flash sites with marvelous experience. The site size was controlled by its creator. There is no difference in this regard between bloated flash site and bloated site built with standard browser APIs.

Indexing was fixable by some additional effort and it's the same with these days SPAs.

Basically most of those complains apply to a lot of modern web sites.

The restaurant websites that required flash were a pain in the ass, for sure. But there were some amazing experiments in pushing the boundaries of what I considered a website to be. This is an archive of one of my favourites, the Requiem for a Dream website:

http://archive.hi-res.net/requiem/

> You had content which couldn't be indexed, broken browser functionality, severe usability issues, big load times (let's not forget that bandwidth wasn't always ample as it is today), security vulnerabilities

You're describing modern, client rendered web applications.

At least one of those things is significantly reduced with modern client rendered web applications: security vulnerabilities.

I wholeheartedly agree the host of power than Flash brought, but I'm glad for its demise because — among other reasons — of this: that rich interactivity on the web is now largely standardized and open.

This was the main factor that had developers cheering for Flash's demise. 1000 terrible restaurant websites plus the fear that it might catch on and supplant HTML thus ceding ownership of the web to Adobe.

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