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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

This is how you enable creative web design. Sure, you shouldn't necessarily run your business on something like this (for a multitude of reasons), but for personal websites and prototypes this is great.

When Flash plugins were on the way out everyone always repeated how this would open the door for equally powerful HTML5 tooling. But while HTML5 has gained all the technical capabilities of Flash, nobody has managed to make an authoring tool as good as Adobe Flash. With the loss of Flash we mostly lost the creative websites by people who can't code but are great at visual design. This comes close to enabling that again.

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Macromedia Flash era was the best for authoring IMO. But I was just a hobbyist, didn't use it professionally.

I loved Flash, and I think that SVG, if I can create proper tools, has the potential to be as good and maybe to avoid some of the drawbacks.

In fact, I wrote Svija because I took a sabbatical from web design. When I came back, Flash was gone and I just couldn't stomach the idea of twenty years of HTML and CSS. So, SVG.

The problem with SVG is that it performs terribly especially when compared with Flash. This site is relatively small and it's super slow on an i9

I wonder why that's the case. Flash was all vectors and could run really well once it reached maturity.

Is it because we're shoving the SVG into the dom or something? Or using expensive SVG features?

This was a terrible era. Specifically because of sites that had no business using it making their whole site flash. Like restaurants.

There were definitely a lot of bad Flash sites, but there were some amazingly creative, artistic sites too.

I could list a bunch of links, but of course none of them work anymore.

Perhaps I could require some sort of SVG Licence to use Svija, or an oath to usability ;-)

It's not like they were completely unusable, it's just showing text in an annoying way.

On the plus side, it's a testament to how nearly anyone could build a website. I'm sure many many people got their feet wet in web dev making simple sites for local businesses because the bar was so low.

Except when they were completely unusable.

Making an html version of most of the stuff i'm talking about would have been much easier than the flash version. when the only interactivity is changing pages.

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