Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

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I'm well aware the Adobe Animate still exists, a fact I'm glad for. I'm well aware that it can export to HTML5, and even Haxe/OpenFL, an open source project I've personally invested a ton of time and money into.

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.

I was really into action script and flash development back in the early 2000s. I can't think of anything I couldn't do today better using an animation framework.

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 I think that market has been replaced by Unity and UE4.

That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.

My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can.

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 title says HTML5 but you seem to actually want better tools.

The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools and that the tools for flash were refined and easy to use for a lot of people who were not necessarily deeply technical.

HTML5 is just the technology, so saying it doesn't replicate flash's tools is not reasonable.

You’re missing his point which he has stated very plainly in the first sentence of the message you’re replying to:

> The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools

Disagreeing, not missing.

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.

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