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You can still use your old copy of Dreamweaver if you really want to. I think Adobe still sells new versions too. I wouldn't advise using website builders in ge

You can still use your old copy of Dreamweaver if you really want to. I think Adobe still sells new versions too. I wouldn't advise using website builders in general (Dreamweaver was always kind of sketch), and I certainly wouldn't advise using Adobe software in general (they're an awful company with overpriced products), but I can't imagine modern Dreamweaver has gotten particularly worse than it was before. You can't use Flash, that's fair. But my goodness, you wouldn't want to. The small amount of incidental complexity we've gained from forcing pizza shops to stop laying out their interface in Flash is worth it. And outside of the plugins that were absolutely the correct decision to remove, everything else you want to use is still available. What we're getting at is that with a few exceptions (HTTPS, Java plugins, Flash), virtually all of the old APIs that you used to use on the web are still supported and are the exact same to use, if not better. This is not the case everywhere with every language and platform. But the web has done a reasonably good job at being backwards compatible. You're worried about deploy processes, and you want to deploy a free site on Netlify? You don't need to learn Git, you can hand-code your site in static HTML or generate it using any program you want and just upload it as a zipped folder. Your Dreamweaver builds will still run today. Font faces? Still work, you don't need to worry about FOUT. You miss table layouts? Hackernews is using that crud right now. The complexity around build tools, processes, and frameworks is all optional. The browser doesn't care. If you're missing the old experience of building websites, then just do that. I maintain https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com. It is hand-coded HTML that I wrote in a text editor. It has no Javascript, no build process, no minification, nothing. And it works fine; no one has ever complained about it to me. If you're adding complexity to your engineering process and it's making your job harder instead of easier, then take a step back and ask yourself why you're adding that complexity in the first place. Is it solving a problem? Or do you just feel like you need to do things "properly" based on the current development style? Because again, the browser doesn't care.

watwut 6y ago
Oh, you would want to use it. The games and similar mini software just don't have anything comparable to it. The loss of flash is very unfortunate.
- galangalalgol 6y ago
  The Ruffle project is trying to make a flash player with wasm. Mayne that at least can return.
- danShumway 6y ago
  I loved Flash, deeply, I learned to program in Flash. But I am slowly in the process of doing a 180 on this, where before I felt like we had lost something with Flash that nobody had ever replicated. People have different things they liked about Flash. I liked the animation-centered workflow (and I still think there's room for innovation in this space with modern tools). I miss the ability to export vector animations. There's a technical hole that I still think could be filled by other programs today. But often, I hear people lamenting the loss of community and the loss of universal publishing. And on that note, aside from the animation-centered workflow, I'm less certain that the rest of that stuff is actually gone. Unity publishes to websites just as well as Flash did, if not better. Unity even lets you publish to Linux, which Flash never really supported well. And honestly, I'm not sure the community is dead either, it's just moved on to platforms like Scratch, Pico 8, Itch.io, and Roblox. I see very similar energies when I interact with people on those platforms. It's a different community, it's younger kids with different norms, the old generation isn't as welcome anymore. But I'm not sure the reason for that is because Flash died. Sometimes generations grow up and younger generations go act creative in different spaces. So yes, there is a very specific workflow for a very specific type of game that no longer works on the web. I've used Unity, and I don't really like Unity, I hate it's resource management, I hate that we're still using proprietary software after so many years. But I think more people are making games with Unity today than were making them back then on Flash. It's more accessible. I'm very, very slowly changing my opinion on this. Part of it is that Flash is still available today under Animate, and while it is still chained to Adobe I've still never heard a really good breakdown of how it's worse or what features it doesn't support anymore. As far as I can tell, you can still use Actionscript 3.0 with Animate. It is proprietary and expensive, but so was Flash -- so if it's purely a technical problem, then I'm not 100% sure that you couldn't still make a Flash website/game today. I still think there's a hole here that could be better served by Open Source toolchains, but I'm becoming less convinced that it is as big of a deal as I previously thought. If you're trying to make games, now is a really good time to be alive. It could be better, but if you give me the option of making games in 1999 or making games today, I'm not going back to 1999. And aside from that, even if Flash is a hole, it's still very specifically a hole for games. Even during its heyday, building static websites in Flash was a sin. Almost everything else you want to use to build a static website is still available. Just not that specific sinful part :)

watwut 6y ago

Oh, you would want to use it. The games and similar mini software just don't have anything comparable to it. The loss of flash is very unfortunate.

galangalalgol 6y ago
The Ruffle project is trying to make a flash player with wasm. Mayne that at least can return.
danShumway 6y ago
I loved Flash, deeply, I learned to program in Flash. But I am slowly in the process of doing a 180 on this, where before I felt like we had lost something with Flash that nobody had ever replicated. People have different things they liked about Flash. I liked the animation-centered workflow (and I still think there's room for innovation in this space with modern tools). I miss the ability to export vector animations. There's a technical hole that I still think could be filled by other programs today. But often, I hear people lamenting the loss of community and the loss of universal publishing. And on that note, aside from the animation-centered workflow, I'm less certain that the rest of that stuff is actually gone. Unity publishes to websites just as well as Flash did, if not better. Unity even lets you publish to Linux, which Flash never really supported well. And honestly, I'm not sure the community is dead either, it's just moved on to platforms like Scratch, Pico 8, Itch.io, and Roblox. I see very similar energies when I interact with people on those platforms. It's a different community, it's younger kids with different norms, the old generation isn't as welcome anymore. But I'm not sure the reason for that is because Flash died. Sometimes generations grow up and younger generations go act creative in different spaces. So yes, there is a very specific workflow for a very specific type of game that no longer works on the web. I've used Unity, and I don't really like Unity, I hate it's resource management, I hate that we're still using proprietary software after so many years. But I think more people are making games with Unity today than were making them back then on Flash. It's more accessible. I'm very, very slowly changing my opinion on this. Part of it is that Flash is still available today under Animate, and while it is still chained to Adobe I've still never heard a really good breakdown of how it's worse or what features it doesn't support anymore. As far as I can tell, you can still use Actionscript 3.0 with Animate. It is proprietary and expensive, but so was Flash -- so if it's purely a technical problem, then I'm not 100% sure that you couldn't still make a Flash website/game today. I still think there's a hole here that could be better served by Open Source toolchains, but I'm becoming less convinced that it is as big of a deal as I previously thought. If you're trying to make games, now is a really good time to be alive. It could be better, but if you give me the option of making games in 1999 or making games today, I'm not going back to 1999. And aside from that, even if Flash is a hole, it's still very specifically a hole for games. Even during its heyday, building static websites in Flash was a sin. Almost everything else you want to use to build a static website is still available. Just not that specific sinful part :)