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Besides the notorious security issues, flash had abysmal accessibility, cross platform support was nominal at best if you weren't on windows, and despite this i

Besides the notorious security issues, flash had abysmal accessibility, cross platform support was nominal at best if you weren't on windows, and despite this it was being used in all sorts of places where it was completely unnecessary, like what seemed to be nearly every restaurant website. There were websites with navigation menus written in flash for no good reason at all, just because whoever made the website thought it would be cool to use more animations or something. The whole thing was a disaster. Nominally cross-platform video playback was hardly a consolation.

PaulHoule 4y ago
I remember getting involved in an argument with somebody over this back when it was called 'FutureSplash' and before it was bought by Macromedia. This guy was a political activist and we were working with him to put Noam Chomsky lectures online long before there were podcasts but he thought people would connect better w/ animation-heavy interfaces. I thought it was a good case study in how somebody who is worried about corporate power when it affects the workplace or foreign policy can be indifferent to corporate power over technology. My friend Harel and I felt pretty firmly that a web based on open standards was going to be good for 'ordinary people' having venues for self-expression. I think Mike Albert's viewpoint is closer to the mainstream though, where most people perceive ease-of-use as more 'liberating' than personal control, like that 1984 ad by Apple. Today I think it is funny because I like animation-heavy interfaces in video games and think, hypothetically, it would be nice to see some more of that on the web, but I develop a lot of 'intranet' applications that consistently avoid the SPA boondoggle where the one thing I really can't do is animate transitions. I guess I could use HTMX and push the animations out to a 'frame' around the 'pages' that get loaded but that is unappealing to me because I'd like to have completely integrated animations and not a library of dissolves, fades, wipes and loading indicators that are much less necessary if you are loading a 25k 'screen' as opposed to 2.5 MB of Javascript.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I remember getting involved in an argument with somebody over this back when it was called 'FutureSplash' and before it was bought by Macromedia. This guy was a political activist and we were working with him to put Noam Chomsky lectures online long before there were podcasts but he thought people would connect better w/ animation-heavy interfaces. I thought it was a good case study in how somebody who is worried about corporate power when it affects the workplace or foreign policy can be indifferent to corporate power over technology. My friend Harel and I felt pretty firmly that a web based on open standards was going to be good for 'ordinary people' having venues for self-expression. I think Mike Albert's viewpoint is closer to the mainstream though, where most people perceive ease-of-use as more 'liberating' than personal control, like that 1984 ad by Apple. Today I think it is funny because I like animation-heavy interfaces in video games and think, hypothetically, it would be nice to see some more of that on the web, but I develop a lot of 'intranet' applications that consistently avoid the SPA boondoggle where the one thing I really can't do is animate transitions. I guess I could use HTMX and push the animations out to a 'frame' around the 'pages' that get loaded but that is unappealing to me because I'd like to have completely integrated animations and not a library of dissolves, fades, wipes and loading indicators that are much less necessary if you are loading a 25k 'screen' as opposed to 2.5 MB of Javascript.