I don't think so.. I can imagine any of my musician friends installing $FRAMEWORK and building a web site full of their own animations, menu's, and music playback..
Flash for all its "evilness" still IMHO hasn't been matched.
That being said, Flash definitely had a learning curve that wasn't entirely trivial. So much of the javascript community seems focused on using JS for the really big applications and large scale stuff these days, but I think it'd be nice if innovation were happening in accessibility and tooling for light programmers.
Light programmers is my idea of people who want to build basic functionality but not huge applications and may not be formally trained or have any experience programming, like how small and medium businesses used Flash for cheesy website animation back in the day.
There's a lot of overhead knowledge needed to create in HTML/CSS/JS, and a lot of the beginner tutorials feel like they assume you're intending to become a web dev.
There's more tooling and better libraries for JS today than ever before, but these things are hard for beginners. Stuff like webpack is great but it seems like the focus is in that space.
You could argue that the high complexity large application space is where the focus needs to be, and where js is at its weakest, but I can't help but feel like we could do better. The best thing (imo) for beginners using JS (who don't intend to continue learning to become a developer) is JQuery. Yeah people abuse it but it does simplify basic animation stuff for inexperienced developers.
End rant I guess?
IBM OS/2 had a Parts Workbench that was easier than Visual Basic and Borland had Delphi based on Object Pascal.
Ruby on Rails comes close and Python is the new Visual Basic for a new generation of programmers now.
None of the other parts of the .Net universe are comparable, though; most are either kind of clunky (Webforms) or require a much bigger learning curve to get going.
Been around for a long time, was formerly called RealBASIC.
Easy to use, powerful and proprietary. As a consumer, flash sites were often horrible. Get a few minutes into using it, find out that there's a bug keeping you from advancing any farther in exploration and your task, so you need to reload. Oh good, you have to start from scratch again because it's not actually using URLs to keep track of your location. Want to know how to find a manual on a manufacturer's site? Oh, good, they used flash, so their site isn't indexed correctly by any search engines, and you have to navigate their poor idea of what made a good UI in 1995.
Flash was good for media delivery. For everything else, it just broke how the web was expected to work.
I get where you are coming from, but being snide when supporting something that was misused so badly is a bit one sided.
Excel is great and has enabled millions of people to accomplish things that expensive coders were previously needed for (and that was a net good) but when misused these things can cause terrible problems[0].
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinh...
I readily agree that Flash was horrible, but none of the things you mentioned has improved with the demise of Flash, at all.
Of course indexing has improved since the demise of flash, compared to the heyday of flash. Flash contained all text in an unindexable binary blob.
Accessibility was very poor since, again, flash prevented the use of any browser features for that without offering its own.
Flash was also a leading security hole for years.
- There are four different browser engines, but no website ever asks you to install a different one (except some Google Cloud stuff tsktsktsk)
- You can develop a complex javascript application and, at the very end, discover that it works in all browsers.
- You can develop a complex javascript application
- seriously, this point needs repetition. In the past I'd spend more than half of the time trying to get something working at least in both firefox and IE, with the fix for A frequently braking B...
- websites cannot open 100 popups, maximise the window etc.
- almost all websites are usable on screens of every size (flash liked to insist on, for example, 800x600. which almost never was the right size)
- Even worse than Flash: Java Applets, Active-X. Seeing a Swing UI today is like a reunion with your childhood tormentor after you've succeeded in life and he has three marriages and a stint in jail behind him: you still have vivid memories of the pain, but it can no longer hurt you.
- Most important: Flash broke everything that makes the web a web. It was simply a delivery platform for binaries with URIs. No links, no way to spider content, access limited to the select platforms Adobe felt like supporting etc.
- The javascript complexity that can run in browsers is an achievement. Relatively speaking, flash was the one runtime Java promised to be, and Java applets however clunky looking back were as futuristic as today's tools are in some use cases.
- Responsive flash apps were perfectly possible if you wanted. Most never learnt that though. That resolution was painful tho.
- Ajax apps are the original JavaScript apps. It was possible to build desktop apps in the browser just fine. 1999, Outlook web app was one of the first complex JavaScript apps in 2000.
- Flash also developed the ability to index content. Same flaw though can exist in js apps too.
I don't want to guess how much of the stuff you wrote about you have used, but those were my experiences in that time. A lot of bleeding edge stuff much like today. I'd still take today though because there's so many more folks online.
It does feel like there has been a lot of constant reinvention and a loss of forward progress. We just keep rebuilding browsers, flash as webassembly, and no shortage of frameworks to extend programming languages to the web, and recreating libraries. I like choice and being a polyglot as much as the next person but at a certain point it seems like our tools are getting broader instead of deeper.
Flash was far from perfect but probably could have stuck around for a few more years while the future of progressive apps matured. They never really got their security game together, but flash lite powered graphical guis on more mobile phones than anyone knew and it was possibly a threat to iOS as no other rich experience existed in mobile.
Instead we all had to wait painfully for JavaScript apps to mature to what flash could do 10 years ago with flex and air (although I wasnt a fan of either they laid a lot of ground work for the rich internet application space.)
Granted it probably helped push things along that flash wasn't around as a crutch...
Some would argue developing mobile and js apps as as painful in the past 5 years as web dev was in the 90s.
I'm just pleased to see the ubiquity and js apps on any medium continue to converge. Hope the high level tooling is coming next to create a whole new segment of beginners.
Sure, the real problem is the people who made poor decisions and made sites like that in the first place, and still do.
The reality is just that HTML in those early days was grim - IE and Netscape were making up tags willy-nilly, and any kind of interactivity or media playback was nigh-impossible to achieve without plugins. (Even for static layouts it could be a significant challenge to make things work the same way across browsers and platforms.)
So the result was, for interactive media-driven sites, developers used Flash outside the bounds of what it was meant for, and the back button broke. The alternative wasn't to not break the back button, the alternative was having a big "This site only works in Netscape!" banner, or having no interactivity at all.
I'm well aware of what you state and the entire point of my statements is that those decisions were wrong.
The solution I would have preferred to those issues you describe is actually not that at all. It's to make simple, usable sites like the one we are currently on.
As far as what you're saying about intent, i am not so sure that adobe never intended or encouraged flash to be used to make whole websites. I suppose one could research that, but it's beside any point i was making.
Neat, but many companies in 2004 wanted sites that couldn't be made out of styled text - minigames, product configurators, branded media experiences or whatever - and they wanted interactivity more than they wanted the back button to work. If you think they were wrong to do so that's fine, but it hasn't got much to do with Flash.
> I suppose one could research that, but it's beside any point i was making.
Its part of the point I was making - that Flash was originally a technology for inserting interactive animations into web pages, and all the significant usability concerns arose from people using it for more than that, which they did because the alternatives were so lacking. (Of course this put pressure on the alternatives to improve, which is what TFA is all about.)