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Comment by mconnors | Hacker News Reader

Something you can make in flash in like 10 minutes- and it works on everything ( not mobile ).

We might as well just drop the whole idea of HTML, JS and CSS and just use 3rd party plugins to replace the whole thing. That totally makes sense. Innovation is for idiots.

The only "innovative" thing about this is- its not flash. The reason its not flash is because front end developers, hate flash with a passion that borders, frothing at the mouth psychosis. They hate flash because very simply it takes work off of their desk. At the end of the day, a client still won't want to pay twice as much for something that works on half of modern browsers when in reality his high school kid could have done it in 10 minutes with flash, (unless its for mobile). Its the same stupid argument I've heard for the past 10 years, but the difference today is mobile platforms won't support flash (or it just sucks on mobile) and there is finally an opportunity to kill flash. That pretty much sums it up. Haters will hate, client will still pay for flash, flash sucks on mobile, lame slide shows are not innovative.

First, innovation doesn't only happen in a single application and runtime (the browser). Flash has innovated as much as FF4 has. It's weird that the distribution model for the runtime defines what is innovation and what isn't. A runtime that is distributed as a plugin is inherently not innovative, while one that is a monolithic application is. Go figure.

And I think the point of the original poster isn't that we should drop HTML. But rather that this application isn't cool on first principles. You can show this same app to your child as a Flash app and your child should be just as impressed. It's a good work for HTML, but as far as applications distributed by a web server it isn't especially innovative. But we should keep working on HTHML/JS/CSS as it will get better.

because its the distribution that is innovative, its nice being able to draw text and images and move them around and stuff but that doesnt quite fall under my definition of innovative, for html and flash

the features of html/css/javascript are not impressive, the fact that you can build increasingly complex application that will work on a common runtime installed on every pc and most people tablets and phones without (barely)any packaging or installation procedures is a modern day miracle

the fact that you can build increasingly complex application that will work on a common runtime installed on every pc and most people tablets and phones without (barely)any packaging or installation procedures is a modern day miracle

This requires me to install a whole browser! For some reason the HN crowd sees installing FF4 as free. Installing a plug-in as nearly the equivalent to jail time, a horrendous chore.

With all due respect to all the excitement in mobile (where Flash is nonexistent), HTML5 fundamentally won't change the desktop at all. And certainly looking at an application that I've seen high school students do in Flash is simply not exciting. I salute HTML for finally getting there, but its just not fundamentally very interesting.

> Installing a plug-in as nearly the equivalent to jail > time, a horrendous chore.

That's because that's what it generally has been, in the case of Flash. You may want to read http://blog.zpao.com/post/538816688/how-to-install-flash-on-... if you haven't had that particular "pleasure"...

Installing a plugin is generally a one click procedure and I made no reference to firefox or plugins.

I wasnt being specific to this one page (which works in chrome as well), but at the same time it can be viewed in browsers going back to mosaic with varying degrees of aesthetic.

html has already changed the desktop and it is only going to go further, there are operating systems coming out that have nothing but a browser, most phones these days come with a browser, we are still in the early stages of building the most ubiqitous and usable computing platform that has ever existed, you might not get excited about it, but I do.

That's an interesting definition of "everything" you have there.

The only thing I can relate 'everything' with Flash is that everything spikes up. Seeing this demo I noticed no big spikes on CPU, etc.

Well I guess you won't get spikes on any version of IE since that can't even display it.

can't bury that which is true.

Pretty cheap downvotes you're getting here. Wish I could upvote you more than once.

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