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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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

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