Tbf, you can produce very similar output to .swf with the likes of WebGL, Canvas, SVGs, or a combination of those technologies. But the authoring tools fostered

Tbf, you can produce very similar output to .swf with the likes of WebGL, Canvas, SVGs, or a combination of those technologies. But the authoring tools fostered a community of developers who didn't see themselves as programmers at all. They saw themselves as artists. And users benefited a great deal from that. In fact, some aspects of the IDE were so good, that some 'developers' didn't even care to use it to develop programs. They produced cartoons instead. I think Craig McCracken's Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends was the most successful work of this kind. In the place of that creativity now, we have cleaner code, to be sure, but we now also have an awfully boring technology war, and a load of unnecessarily complicated UI code. I might miss Flash a whole lot less, if someone created a HTML5 authoring tool with the same toolkit the Flash IDE once had.