Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

This is true but it is a common misunderstanding imo. Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime.

So why doesn’t that tool exist?

Well... as far as I know it does. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what Adobe Animate is meant to be:

https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

So why isn’t it causing a Flash-style revolution?

In my opinion... Because of YouTube. Twitter. Etc.

Before everyone had heaps of bandwidth, you needed to consume smaller files. A full 1080p video was unfathomable with the codecs, compute and network bandwidth available in the early 2000s. Swf files however were small and easy to distribute. The perfect storm occurred due to the structure of early internet, and communities like Newgrounds flourished.

I honestly think Flash just got a bit stale. It stopped being new and exciting, and for animations video sites were probably going to win out anyways. For games, a lot of indie devs now target PCs and game consoles. Unity and Construct export to HTML5. People wanted to do more advanced things to the point where Flash itself started doing things like 3D rendering, at which point the appealing aspects of Flash started to make less sense anyways.

Many seem to argue passionately, probably from an emotional place, that Flash was killed. Honestly, I just don’t agree. Flash was dying either way. Everyone just gradually decided to cut off the life support.

The era it ushered in will be missed, though.

> Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime.

The author doesn't argue a tool like Flash should exist. He just states the fact that HTML has still not caught up to fill the blank caused by Flash exiting yet, which is true IMO.

If that’s their argument, it’s missing insight in my opinion. The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting, and in fact it’s full of undesirable problems. If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing. If you even just ignore Flash itself and include Flex, Haxe, and other authoring tools that can deal in flash runtime, it still isn’t that appealing.

These arguments get confusing because HTML, SVG and JavaScript are human readable and writeable. But that doesn’t mean the way someone should make animations in HTML5 is by typing coordinates into a text editor.

If there really is a gap in the web runtime that Flash fills, what is it?

Edit: also, I believe they are directly and indirectly arguing for the existence of such a tool:

> 1) For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file

> 2) You have a robust authoring tool that is animation/graphics-first and newbie friendly

The first one is 100% technically possible with tooling; though admittedly better embedding of assets would be nice. The second one is just literally directly asking for such a tool.

> The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting, and in fact it’s full of undesirable problems. If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing.

The runtime and the tooling go together. The reason why tooling doesn't exist for HTML5, SVG, and Javascript is it's just so damn complex and fiddly that it's impossible to paper-over and abstract with a robust authoring tool. Both sides of Flash were designed for the ease of this kind of development.

There hasn't been a good high-level authoring tool for HTML in decades and the situation is getting worse, not better.

> The runtime and the tooling go together. The reason why tooling doesn't exist for HTML5, SVG, and Javascript is it's just so damn complex and fiddly that it's impossible to paper-over and abstract with a robust authoring tool.

Indeed. The fact that Flash is proprietary meant that all browsers had to use the same software (up to versioning and OS API implementations) to run SWF files. Now with HTML5, developers now have to deal with differences between different browsers (Chromium/Safari/Firefox are the most popular ones).

> The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting

It was very interestin. Among the vastly underrated things it had was the insanely fast drawing of vector shapes with insane things like blazingly fast flood fills. It was extremely resilient in the presence of self-intersecting shapes, shapes of almost any complexity, open plygons etc. etc.

> If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing.

The tooling seems to be what most people miss. That's not trivial. Adobe Animate is supposed to fill that void, but from what I've seen, it's a long way from a drop-in solution.

The author argues that a tool like Flash the authoring software should exist, but makes no argument about Flash the runtime.

An authoring software just like Flash could exist for the HTML runtime -- it isn't the nature of HTML which is the problem. Thus it's not HTML which has to "catch up", but vendors of authoring software.

> The author argues that a tool like Flash the authoring software should exist, but makes no argument about Flash the runtime.

Yes, this is what I meant. Sorry, I didn't clarify this in the replied comment.

> it isn't the nature of HTML which is the problem

It is in some degrees. The same html/js code might run some differently in different browsers, from either behaviors or performance aspects.

On the other hand, Flash runtime only presents some small behavior differences on different OSes or with different CPU architectures. And for different OSes/browser combos with the same-power CPUs+GPUs, there is almost no performance differences.

> On the other hand, Flash runtime only presents some small behavior differences on different OSes or with different CPU architectures. And for different OSes/browser combos with the same-power CPUs+GPUs, there is almost no performance differences.

Really? Last time I used Flash, a few years ago when it still mattered, it used 100% CPU just to play video on Linux. The Windows version didn't seem to have this problem and I deduced that Adobe just didn't care about Linux.

We'll there we have it: we lived in a world with good tooling for creative works but a bad runtime, and we replaced the runtime without replacing the authoring tools. I think that's a shame.

Adobe produced Flash and the authoring tools. They mostly gave up when Flash's runtime was deemed bad. Turns out, they have an authoring tool for HTML5 that looks a lot like flash: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

So, yeah, I'd question why Animate isn't good enough to fill Flash's role.

Flash/animate added html5 export in 2012, five years after the iPhone was released and the writing was on the wall. But another big difference is that Flash was widely pirated and ran on the devices that everyone had (PCs.) A similarly accessable authoring tool would need to run on mobile and be cheaply available. I also think that mobile devices are simply not as good for creative work as PCs (mice/keyboards) are. The only way to fit lots of information through a smartphone is to take a video. It cannot be used by amateur programmers nearly as effectively. The special sauce wasn't just flash; the special sauce was the PC as a creative platform.

The web is different now. Back in the days of flash, "platforms" weren't really a thing and social media was pretty much "whoever has figured out how to host a webpage".

We don't live in that era anymore (and I sort of miss it :( ). We live in an era of SaaS and major platforms. For 90% of "custom webpages" wordpress covers it. For the 9% not covered, flash wouldn't really be a good fit. The loss is for that 1% of creative fun junk by hobbyist that's just missing all together. Flash made it easy for a novice to sculpt something. However, it didn't make it easy for a business to maintain something.

> Back in the days of flash, "platforms" weren't really a thing and social media was pretty much "whoever has figured out how to host a webpage".

The “days of flash” included the rise to dominance of Facebook (Facebook games were largely, maybe entirely, Flash), and even moreso included the entire MySpace era of social media.

> So why isn’t it causing a Flash-style revolution?

From the animators I've listened to, the answer is that Animate sucks to work with and is a royal pain in the butt, so they either use different tools or stick to older versions of Adobe or even Macromedia Flash/MX.

Even for videos Flash was the best solution for a long time, almost every video sharing website used Flash video players until HTML5 video got developed.

All that 'HTML 5 video' did was move responsibility for the media player from an extension and into the browser, and wrap it in standard markup.

So ironically the designer no longer just asks 'is Flash available on this platform?' but instead 'which codecs are available on this browser and platform?'.

And apart from Video Codec improvement, many HTML5 video are still not as good as Flash Video Streaming. Mostly an implementation issues and not technical. But no one has the interest of improving it.

This isn't accurate at all. HLML 5 video, MSE etc. have a world of improvements over the mess of FLV / Flash / RTMP streaming.

Can you give some examples of what's wrong with HTML5 video streaming and these implementation issues? There's a huge community of video engineers working to make streaming video better, and we'd love to hear feedback.

Adobe Animate costs 20$/month. I don't recall exactly how much Flash cost, but it sure wasn't that much. The barrier to entry is higher, thus popularity wanes.

If I recall correctly, it has always cost roughly as much as Photoshop during Adobe ownership. That is to say: prior to the Adobe CC pricing model, Flash cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a quick spot check on Archive.org and it looks like "Flash Professional 8" had a retail price of $700 in 2006. $20/mo is definitely a lower barrier to entry than a one-off $700 payment.

A rep from Adobe once told me that about 90% of Photoshop installs were pirated (this was around 2002). I'd bet that a similar amount of Flash content was made using pirated copies of Flash.

Flash content on sites like AlbinoBlackSheep and the like, sure - but can you put a price on culture?

Really? All those kids making those stick figure animations on the early web sites had access to 700$ software? Sounds amazing.

Piracy was easier and rampant back then. Adobe (and Microsoft, etc.) knew that the kids who learned on pirated copies would lead to legit sales later.

It was the era of serials and cracks. Astalavista.box.sk. Activators and subscription software came later. Simpler times :)

Nah. Someone have them copy for free (yes piracy) and then they gave copies to their friends.

Piracy was pretty normal back then.

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