Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

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Flash was not 10 years ahead.

It's more like the web browser war with IE6 winning and no further development between 2001 and 2006 halted the web development. The AJAX technology was added to Firefox in the meantime (2004) so that IE5+ and Firefox supported AJAX and Web 2.0 was born. As W3C XHTML 1 and especially XHTML2 failed, HTML4 was enhanced to HTML5 thanks to the WHATWG.

SVG was well known in early 2000 but only Adobe provided a plugin for IE. No web browser supported SVG.

There was also the SMIL standard that is an replacement to Adobe Flash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integra... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML%2BTIME , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML%2BSMIL

As Adobe bought Macromedia and the focus shifted from vector animation to video and 3D. The feature creep with Actionscript 2/3/Flex/3D-API/etc. decreased the stability and quality of Flash. The mobile counterpart FlashLite was always several features behind the desktop version.

Up through AS3 Flash was fantastic. We saw some of the most amazing animations and multimedia up through that era, including H.264 video players.

But Flex. OMG Flex. Trying to bend 180° to serve developers was never going to work. After that it was all downhill.

You're right, Flash wasn't 10 years ahead of its time. It's far more:

Tokyo Plastic's Drum Machine: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/drum

... from 2003 (or earlier?): http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?516504-rockst...

Canvas perf has almost caught up, ... what's lacking is tooling.

Here is Shumway playing back this fantastic animation:

http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/examples/inspector/insp...

Performance is okay, but the canvas vector rendering in HTML5 still fails horribly when it comes to adjacent edges.

In that animation, look how the black outlines against the grey clothing leaves a white blur. That's a fundamental flaw that's been with canvas since the beginning, and is a severe problem in the general assumptions of immediate mode rendering. It's especially terrible when doing tiled 2d, or polygons, where these transparent edge gaps stick out the worst.

There's some audio drift, but good to see it's close =)

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