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There is twenty years of Flash content that shouldn't be erased from history. This isn't any different from people working on emulating old systems.
by kryptiskt 7y ago
There is twenty years of Flash content that shouldn't be erased from history. This isn't any different from people working on emulating old systems.
- sjwright 7y agoI'm 100% on board for projects like Ruffle to exist for reasons of archiving history. My objection is only to people who in any way lament the death of Flash. Consider that nobody is scrambling to build a clone of the Netscape Navigator 4 parser and renderer. The fact that this project exists is testament to its importance for a brief period—but also to the awfulness of the canonical implementation.
- pjmlp 7y agoFlash might be dead on Web, but it is still doing quite alright on desktop and mobile.
- fenomas 7y agoPeople talking fondly about flash are thinking of the way that it massively lowered the bar to creating interactive content on the web, ushering in an explosion of indie games, animations, videos, etc., the like of which the internet had never seen and may never see again. The "awfulness of its implementation" (compared to what, one wonders?) is orthogonal to what people liked about it.
- sjwright 7y agoAbsolutely, Flash inspired a form of artistic communication. But it wasn’t as egalitarian as you imply—and to the extent that it was egalitarian, I suspect that was on the back of rampant software piracy. Meanwhile, plenty of treasure has been found in the smoldering ashes of a dumpster fire. Rick Astley inspired an entirely new genre of comedy. That doesn’t speak to the inherent merit of his music.
- buboard 7y agoThere are things that were easy to do with flash, and are still a nightmare with html, like group video lectures with chat. Adobe even provided their own media server. Replicating that with html is not at all easy to solve. And no, making “an app for that” is no replacement