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