Is he ranting that Adobe Animate doesn't exist? Because it does and seamlessly exports HTML.
I'm pretty sure if they aren't already you could get a bundler configuration for webpack that would build a single file data uris and all.
I'm pretty sure if they aren't already you could get a bundler configuration for webpack that would build a single file data uris and all.
It's great those initiatives exist, I've spent years of my career supporting them, but at replicating what Flash did in its prime, it's still not quite the same. The abstraction leaks around the edges and the community and singular simplicity and straightforwardness of what Flash had is long gone and a tiny open source community always heroically struggling for funding and contributions can't be expected to replicate it.
Also, RE: Animate, updates randomly break things with previous versions, and being proprietary I have no idea how long Adobe is going to let it continue existing and keep it compatible with anything I might want to use it for.
Anyways, the main point of the thread was just that the claims that HTML/JS was this perfect go to replacement for what we really valued about Flash just rings hollow to me 10 years later.
My point is that:
The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level user. An entry level flash tutorial would show you how to do all these things and it would just work. An entry level HTML5/JS tutorial requires multiple dependencies and scary toolsets to a newcomer, assumes a lot more background technical skill, and is more likely to randomly break around the edges.
There was a special happy circle of toolset + community that made something we've now lost, and I feel that the critics spent all their efforts on narrow technical points, and thus missed what really made things special for us.
> The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools
The lack of this specific kind of tooling and community is a clear problem. But is "HTML5" a foundational cause of the problem, or is it a scapegoat? People can legitimately disagree.
Killing flash had to be done. Your complaint is misplaced because you're complaining about the quality of the alternatives. If there was a market for a seamless alternative it would exist. I think that market is gone. I think that market has been replaced by Unity and UE4.
But I don't think Flash could exist nowadays online anyway in the same way - the hardware ecosystem is much more diverse, you can't make a keyboard/mouse game and call it quits so easily, because people with tiny-touchscreen phones might also end up on your site. Trying to treat the web as a single platform is...it's a lot of ground to cover.
The cruellest thing for macbook users are games that require clicking both mouse-buttons simultaneously :P
Jus as an example, Flash is able to redraw only whats needed on the screen whereas Canvas doesn't do this and works like a game where it blows away the whole screen every frame (assuming you're calling clearRect), hence why its best practice to use multiple Canvas elements, off-screen Canvas elements, etc but again, Animate doesn't do that work for you.
And up until the EOL of IE11 next summer you have to manually alter the output to make use of blend modes, which people use a lot of in Flash, if you want full browser support, which is pertinent in domains like healthcare.
Internet Explorer is supported for as long as the OS is, and as such, will see support until at least 2029 on Windows Server 2019. It wouldn't surprise me if the next version of Windows (desktop or server) also includes IE, fully supported for its 10 year lifecycle.
There were a lot of clickbait articles in the past year about various Microsoft services dropping support for IE, but it will still be part of Windows, and still get security updates.