Hacker News Reader

Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

Be careful what you wish for. JS and HTML5 is why we don't have Adobe Flash anymore. There was a whole period in the noughties when web interactivity sucked and so external plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java applets took up the slack.

The alternative to JS is not "no scripting", it's websites that only function with proprietary plugins installed.

View on HN

In my opinion, HTML5 and Flash have always served different audiences.

Flash got axed because the way it was implemented into clients was wasteful, insecure and a bad user experience in general. Same with Java; you can't make the same tools that Java applets once provided through the browser because of the browser's security model, so I'd say the two never competed.

Making a quick interactive animation that works across all kinds of resolutions and sizes was trivial in Flash, but in HTML5 this is a challenge. HTML5 and friends fixed the problems that made web developers grasp at Flash for, like file uploads, animations and predictable interaction with the mouse and keyboard. These features were often already possible in browsers, but Flash was the only tool that made them appear the same in every browser available. They didn't replace the flash scene for games, interactive simulations and other online experiences. The Flash game scene pretty much died when Flash started getting blocked by Chrome, with only a small subset of the community fragmenting and finding their way to frameworks like Unity Web and its then plentiful competitors with high learning curves because they were designed for the "real deal" game developers rather than self-taught animators that turned game dev.

I think JS is a necessity for the web to exist today, but we need an alternative for what once was Flash, Java, Shockwave and more. Too many features have been shoved into HTML and Javascript that have no business there, left to be abused by trackers and hackers alike.

It's not about proprietary vs open, it's about not mixing document rendering with code execution.

Should MS Word and Adobe PDF also execute code? Should I only be able to run an application only by executing it in MS Word and Adobe PDF reader?

> Should MS Word and Adobe PDF also execute code?

Oh boy do I have news for you! https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip...

Not sure about Word as I barely know it, but I'm sure you can execute some sort of code. If not JS, probably VBA or other Microsoft language.

There is a lot of stuff that html should do straight out of the box and that should never have required javascript, like form validation, autocomplete, date pickers, video streaming, etc. Javascript would have been limited to actual SPA instead of being required today even to render static content.

> form validation, autocomplete, date pickers, video streaming

I'm confused by this comment - HTML5 does do all that out of the box. Are you saying it should have done it from the start?

I don't get the bit about JS being required to render static content either...

Yes, people started using javascript for basic things that should always have been part of the html syntax (when the web became dynamic which was the late 90s), to make up for what wasn’t in html.

> The alternative to JS is not "no scripting", it's websites that only function with proprietary plugins installed.

Yes and those were websites that for the most part nobody gave a crap about. The important sites weren't willing to dump so many of their viewers. Heck, even post-JS, the web didn't suck so badly until the option of shutting off JS was removed from browser UI's. Before that, enough users shut off JS that sites wanting wide audiences had to be able to function without it.

No one cared about YouTube? No one cared about Netflix?

People were willing to set exceptions for sites they thought were important. Not important AND requires JS => bye.

I'm not sure the likes of YouTube and Netflix need further privileges compared to the rest of the web.

It's not that they needed privileges, it's that people were willing to grant them. They alternatively would have been willing to install desktop applications, like they do now for Skype, Slack, and a few other services, but not for random web sites that they don't deem to be worth it.

I think you're underestimating the amount of sites that had flash.

Yes, even getting copy /paste functionality to allow a user to click a button to copy a piece of text needed a bit of flash.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6355300/copy-to-clipboar...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com