Hacker News Reader

Comment by bergenty | Hacker News Reader

This is so sad. CSS is so hard to do anything in we have to gush over basic animations like this. It’s sad as a former flash developer.

View on HN

People are gushing because it's a 3D animation with holographic effects, which is pretty surprising to be able to achieve for a primarily-2D layout language.

I've never seen something this seamless and realistic built in flash.

It’s a layer on top of the card that shifts based on how you move it. It’s very, very simple to do in flash.

So something that used to take a $299 software package and required every user to install a browser plugin can be done natively in-browser with few lines of CSS, that's great!

Few lines of esoteric, inaccessible CSS compared to something a child could do in flash.

yup. but after 2 decades and even makes HN devs go wow! and still locks the browser after scrolling 2 pages (chrome).. its very difficult to understand the point that op makes unless you were an experienced developer on flash. I get the same feeling when i see nocode/lowcode tools..[1]

1. https://youtu.be/SY3Y8gb3jYA?t=1380

Flash supported CSS & JS (ActionScript) so I'm not sure what you're comparing. Dynamic rendering like this wasn't possible with CSS in Flash - you needed JS (ActionScript).

People aren't gushing over this being possible in modern browsers - it's been possible to do this and much more in browsers for many years. They're gushing over it being possible with just CSS (no rendering using JS).

Of course it wasn’t possible with CSS in flash (not even sure how useful that was) but was child’s play with only flash (actionscript).

as it is now with webgl

Love it or hate it, something was lost with Flash. Sure the web can do it, but for some reason it doesn't. The combination of tools and language in Flash hit a magic sweet spot that let all kinds of people play and create. This demo is extra impressive for doing it in CSS, but it's also impressive for simply being done at all. You don't see stuff like this on the web too often. If this were a Flash world, I feel like it would be ancient news. I don't wish it were, but it's worth noting.

Absolutely no doubt a lot was lost with flash. Regaining it has been a slow process, mainly due to the challenge of achieving the expressiveness of what flash offered in an open, interoperable and secure way (flash was never any of those things).

But we're here now and you can do a lot more today with open web tech than was ever possible in flash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com