Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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