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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

We already had a phase of "deskilled" frontend development: Adobe Flash. Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required. Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript) you could get full interactivity, and animations were fully editable in UI. Sure, all of this came at a terrible price: no accessibility, no SEO discovery, huge loading times. But it also created some of the most innovative and artistic front ends. And a lot of things that should have never seen the light of day

SVG+CSS+HTML were hailed as the modern replacement for Flash, but nobody ever made an authoring tool suitable for the masses. LLMs are kind of fixing that, just with a very different interface

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“Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript)” is laughably inaccurate - the was a deep familiarity with AS and all its quirks to make a performant, durable, responsive GUI in Flash. There were layers to consider when shipping a self contained executable ala Adobe Air - there were other alternative IDEs and compilers apart from Flash proper - fonts, frames, bitmaps vs vector graphics, how audio and video embedding were handled - it was a complete platform, every bit as complex a battlefield as the browser wars.

Hand-waving AS3-driven app development in the 2010s as ‘some slight JS knowledge’ makes me doubt you were actually there. I was there, and that was not what was happening.

> Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required.

Please note that that "any designer" should have had at least a fairly decent knowledge of ActionScript because Flash wasn't all just magic and sparkles. I know this because I was one of them. Though I had to learn ActionScript by neccessity, I actually learned HTML/CSS/JS before needing to deal with AS

Good news is that HTML in canvas might bring back these cool days :)

Right. And Flash wouldn't end until Jobs won't come out on stage and say that Flash is eating the battery and Apple won't support Flash in their next iPhone, then Flash just ceased to exist. Apparently nobody needed innovative frontends anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is no break pedal on this stuff, it just rolls down the hill until eventually it doesn't. It's a runaway process that feeds itself.

He was able to do that because there were equivalent capabilities out there though.

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