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Comment by jtwaleson | Hacker News Reader

Ok, funny story about ruffle: Years ago in 2012 some co-workers stumbled on the greatest website ever: http://www.novalight.net/NOVALIGHT.html (takes a while to load now) To prove that HTML5/CSS3 was finally ready, I started a side project to recreate it in JS: https://github.com/jtwaleson/NovaLight-Challenge . I never got far and I don't know if that means I never finish side projects or if Flash is officially superior to HTML5. Anyway, the owner of the original site found it and emailed me his appreciation and I think we both had a good laugh about the situation.

Two weeks ago he emailed me again to ask if I could maybe finish the project because flash is now dead, and the site is part of his legacy etc. Instead I slapped ruffle.js on it and everything is back up! It's quite slow to load, but apart from that everything looks great! Ruffle is an amazing project :)

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I googled Peter K Joneleit after your description of him in the README and I was curious if you were just having a bit of fun or if he was involved in defining these web standards. Hooooo boy I was not prepared for his Twitter, it is wild

Wow you're not wrong about his Twitter, that was an adventure. It's so over the top I actually can't tell if it's meant to be satire.

Probably just a hacked account

I don't think so. The "SOL" link on his page leads to even worse stuff.

I was just having fun when I wrote it. Just saw his twitter feed... wow...

To be honest I did see some conspiracy stuff on his website, but I decided to ignore it and just focus on the beautiful Flash animations. Not sure how I feel about it.

I think it’s ok to separate the art from the artist, so to speak. The original site is indeed interesting and a nice example of Flash web design from the era, the Twitter acct doesn’t change this

I'm sorry. I looked at this website, and he explicitly blames me and my people for controlling and destroying the country (and the World Trade Center) and wants me destroyed. I can't look away from that. It's sad that that's OK on Y Combinator's Hacker News, but at least I know what I'm dealing with here.

He's clearly an insane person. There's no use getting worked up about what some digital hobo is screaming.

If you interpreted this thread as an endorsement of anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists then I think you ought to re-read it. To restate in case it is unclear: the original author of the page turned out to have hateful views, but it needn’t reflect at all on the homage that jtwaleson made and they shouldn’t feel bad about it.

I don't think you should feel bad for admiring his work. I'd hesitantly say that he may have some mental troubles and we should rather feel bad for him, which I personally do, sincerely. It's like how many admired TempleOS.

Whew, "some" is putting it lightly.

When trying to recreate the site in HTML5, how did you not notice the big "SOL" button on the flash page linking to his blog about how the Jews did 9/11 and other nonsense?

See my other comment. I gave it a cursory look and ignored it and I'm not sure what I feel about that. I agree with some others in the thread and try to look at the "art" separately from the "artist".

As soon as I saw his handle is literally "GodSend14" I knew I was in for a nice ride.

Eccentric like the late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS creator

Lets call a spade a spade. Its not "Eccentric", he either has serious mental health issues or is an American far right conspiracy theorist. And don't you go implying that all American far right conspiracy theorists have mental health issues, that is not proven or even logical in many ways.

The man's talking about prophecies, comets and reptilians.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a member of United States congress literally blamed forest fires on Jewish space lasers. It's hard to discern these days who has mental issues and who is just conspiracy theorist. Unless a doctor has diagnosed someone I will reserve my judgement

Link: https://twitter.com/godsend14

I deliberately did not include it as it has some pretty awful stuff

This work should be put in the wikipedia list of outsider art[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_outsider_artists

Awesome page, and it even works flawless on mobile.

Took a while to load, but absolutely worth the wait!

Oh god it's every PowerPoint secreting manager's dream and the worst nightmare of everybody else.

I couldn't stop laughing at this page, so dramatic.

So wait, you tried to rebuild a flash website in javascript for the purpose of drawing conclusions about HTML5? How does that work? I mean, Flash and HTML5 are made for different purposes and use cases and HTML5 is not JavaScript.

Obviously the replacement needed a combination of HTML5/CSS3/JS.

Only partly true, but I will ask again: What does reimplementing a Flash site in JS have to do with "HTML5 being ready"? How does HTML5 help you with rebuilding the same thing in _JS_? And why does that mean HTML5 is ready? Ready for what?

It still doesn't connect. You can use JS to manipulate an SVG and animate it. You could theoretically just move absolutely positioned colored divs around ... Or you could draw things on a canvas. Does that mean HTML5 "is ready" or "not ready"? It has got nothing to do with it. But yaaay! Lets go! Downvote a comment, which points out a flaw in logic!

You are not being downvoted because you point out logical flaws, you are being downvoted because you don’t contribute to the topic.

Are you not aware of the discussion about HTML5 versus Flash, or do you just disagree with using HTML5 as an umbrella term here? Even the Wikipedia article [0] about HTML5 has a section on Flash, discussing features such as sound, video, graphics and interactive elements. With "HTML5 being ready" I believe OP is referring to it being a viable alternative to Flash. There is a famous quote where Steve Jobs said that Flash is no longer needed, because there are viable alternatives to the features it provided – HTML5 among others.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#"Thoughts_on_Flash"

I have never heard anyone use HTML5 as an "umbrella term" for meaning HTML5 + JS + CSS(3). Why would anyone do that? It is kind of silly to do that. That changes the whole meaning of the OP. Yes, I heavily disagree with such imprecise usage of terms, that changes the whole meaning. In that case my criticism would have been that the OP is not very clear / ambiguous.

Chill dude.

I have heard several people use it for that umbrella term, particularly back in the days when I lurked around following the WHATWG and CSS mailing lists.

Consider that much of what is new in HTML5 vis-à-vis HTML4 is in the changes to its JS APIs (e.g., <canvas> is all about the JS API), and its requirement that browsers support other standards such as SVG. Actually distinguishing which component of the web stack actually has a particular improvement that you seek to use doesn't provide all that much value... what does it matter if it's really the WHATWG HTML spec that mandated it or it's the ES5 spec?

Instead, you can just call it all "HTML5" and understand that it's using newer technologies that won't work on legacy browsers, although we're now so far deep into the era that we don't have a terminology for what requires a 2020 browser versus a 2015 browser.

> Ready for what?

Ready to re-create the most amazing website in human history.

> You could theoretically just move absolutely positioned colored divs around

I would say that in practical terms, this would mean that HTML5 is not ready.

> Downvote a comment, which points out a flaw in logic!

You must be fun at parties ;)

But if you want my final verdict: I agree with others in the thread that HTML is not a good replacement for Flash. Creativity was much easier to express in Flash.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-...?

> the term "HTML5" is widely used as a buzzword to refer to modern web technologies

This is because HTML5 includes elements like canvas, which is useless without JavaScript, but JavaScript would also be much less useful in the browser without canvas. So "HTML5" is a useful shorthand for what is made possible with HTML5-level browsers https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/scripting-1.ht...

Also this is post-HTML5 (HTML is now a living spec without version numbers), but the HTML standard now actually does include a bunch of JavaScript API specs, such as web workers https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/workers.html#introduc...

Saying HTML5 is ready to replace Flash was one of Steve Jobs' justifications for sentencing Flash to death.

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