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Comment by iamsal | Hacker News Reader

Even though the article is mostly talking about visualizations, but I thought I'd share that I did at one point build a dance choreography software that renders the UI entirely SVG. I was surprised as to how well that worked.

If you're curious, it's called StageKeep, and you can find it here. https://stagekeep.com/

The original project used React Three Fiber, but refactored it to SVG for reasons I don't quite remember. I was inspired by signed distance functions, and the fact that one function could have such an outsized visual effect. Although the software doesn't use SDFs, but I like the idea of atomic functions that accepts some input, and outputs SVG.

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SVG was once hailed as the Flash-killer. With SVG + CSS + JavaScript you could do anything you could do with Flash, including those fancy Flash websites or complex applications. There just weren't any good authoring tools, while Flash had an amazing one.

Then Flash just died without being replaced by anything

Steve jobs killed it when said it would work on the iPhone because if the "huge" memory and battery resources. He said Javascript and HTML was everything you needed.

Here is the original memo: https://www.editionmultimedia.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/...

actually, that memo says Jobs did it for proprietary competitive reasons

Thank gawd. Flash, gawd bless it, was a low point in internet history. People simply couldn’t resist misusing it and abusing it. I’m not blaming the tool per se. But Flash’s addictiveness caused reasonable people to make gawd-awful UI and UX decisions. Crushing Flash is probably Jobs’ most underrated accomplishment.

Honestly, I blame Adobe most for the death of Flash.

If they had been willing to invest the resources needed to make it both performant and, most importantly, secure, there's a much better chance that it would have survived—it might even have been enough for Jobs to be willing to have it work on the iPhone. (Maybe.)

Too many people lamenting how the death of Flash ended a thriving ecosystem of games and other art forms forget that Flash was also a huge resource hog, one of the #1 sources of crashes on many systems, and an absolutely massive vector for malware. I'd love to see some statistics on just how many infections were enabled by Flash, and how fast that declined once it stopped being a requirement to browse large chunks of the web.

And don't forget, either, that Flash wasn't originally an Adobe product: they took it over when they bought Macromedia, eliminating their biggest competitor and guaranteeing their monopoly. I wasn't really paying that much attention to the space, but it wouldn't surprise me if under Macromedia, it was getting better and more frequent updates.

It ended an era of easy to make web games though.

Flash directly led to South Park, however. one of the funniest animated series ever. Worth it!

That kind of Flash is still around and well. Many newer shows are animated in Flash (MLP: FiM, Bluey, the last season of Fairly OddParents, etc.). What was killed wasn't Flash itself, but Shockwave Flash (Flash in the browser).

Part of the problem was that browsers never really fully optimized svg, especially with CSS. Animated stroke patterns were especially rough, if my memory serves.

SVG rendering on browsers is still sub-optimal, which I think is a shame as SVG has great potential if it was treated as a first-class element on the web. Recent improvements to the code driving (2D) Canvas API canvas elements shows that this work could be done across browsers. The big thing holding back development is possibly the continuing failure to finalise the SVG2 standard?

Can you describe what you think is sub-optimal? Is it just the performance or is there something else?

I've been using SVG for years for various purposes (though, admittedly, mostly static graphics) and I can't complain.

It's sub-optimal in that browser developers have - for a number of legitimate reasons - chosen not to spend their time building SVG engines into their browsers that are efficient, robust and fast. I think its more a story of benign neglect rather than active discouragement. Compared to the Javascript and CSS engines, which have improved massively over the past decade, SVG remains ... serviceable for basic requirements (simpler stuff - static graphics, icons, etc), but nothing more. If that makes sense?

I don't know anything about the browser internals or the development process/plans, but I've used requestAnimationFrame to animate SVG graphics from JavaScript and it has been super smooth for me even without a modern graphics card (only on-board graphics). The only time I've seen a performance degradation was with a complex filter involving blurs and specular reflection.

I was doing some pretty decent rendering in HTML4 back in 2008.. supporting various browers (let alone IE6, 7 and maybe 8 at the time)

Around 2010, I did experiment with things like Silverlight and SVGs. SVGs was OK, but the performance quality was not there. It might be a lot better now.

Certain businesses paid for years to keep a private-label version of Flash alive for their internal Flash business applications.

This is a brilliant piece of software and I've had a blast learning about it.

I would LOVE to see this feature: pass it a video, get a formulated choreography based on that video. For example, take a Project21 or Avantgardey video, do some AI/ML voodoo, import their choreography.

Think that'd be possible?

If this worked I'd love to see this applied to Bob Fosse's 'The Rich Man's Frug'. That kind of choreography is the kind that makes me wish I'd picked a wildly different career path.

Wow, that is really cool. As a stage director I touch on choreography a bit. It would be really cool to pre-plan blocking with something like that.

That's good for blocking. Then, for movement, what? Probably not Labanotation.

Minor nit but I noticed at the bottom the text reads “Start free tiral”. Maybe a dance-themed joke that went over my head? But probably intended to be “trial” :^)

Very cool. Are you a dancer yourself?

Heh, thanks.

I wish I was a dancer.

That said, the founder who hired me to work on this is a dancer.

He hired me because he liked the fact that during the interview, when asked "what do you know about dance", I responded "I used to crip walk when I was in high school", so I was the top choice just for that, haha.

Edit: the Founder is Axel Villamil, and he's super charismatic. Y'all are going to love him. Here's him trying to raise an investment round https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyhL5kitUbD/

That is the best reason I've ever heard a developer win an interview with.

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