6 ms·

You know how the Romans made extraordinary concrete but then got conquered and everyone forgot how to make it and it took thousands of years to rebuild the supp

You know how the Romans made extraordinary concrete but then got conquered and everyone forgot how to make it and it took thousands of years to rebuild the supply chain and even then concrete was less durable. Remember that whole mess? Well, let me tell you a story about Macromedia Flash. ;)

MrVandemar 3y ago
> Well, let me tell you a story about Macromedia Flash. ;) Cost money. Great for animation -- not making a button shrink or grow sort of thing, but characters doing things. Lousy for anything to do with websites.
- liquidise 3y ago
  Flash was excellent for making buttons grow/shrink. So much so that many sites had flash-based navs driving static html pages in the top row of their table layouts. Flash had its share of footguns in terms of code organization, but animating interaction was never a weak point.
  - MrVandemar 3y ago
    > Flash was excellent for making buttons grow/shrink. So much so that many sites had flash-based navs driving static html pages in the top row of their table layouts. Yeah, but it was a Frankensteinian bastard of a system. Pretty sure the accessibility of that was zero, and changing a link or adding a new button was never trivial. That was web-design for the worst reasons: for the designers and their clients, but not web-design for the users.
- JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
  Wrong. There was Flex and MXML and it was amazing.
pjbster 3y ago
Hah! I feel exactly the same about Oracle Forms. Never heard of it? 'twas a client-server development IDE which was based on the idea of a "data block", a true-blue bona fide Active Record implementation out in the wild around 8-10 years before Martin Fowler coined the name. Even then the world seemed unaware until Rails arrived.
- bandrami 3y ago
  Allaire also had something similar in ColdFusion (holy crap am I dating myself here): call an array generator with a datasource as its backend and get an array of DB-backed objects you can iterate over.
RobotToaster 3y ago
I have the same feeling about web-assembly and Flash.

MrVandemar 3y ago

> Well, let me tell you a story about Macromedia Flash. ;) Cost money. Great for animation -- not making a button shrink or grow sort of thing, but characters doing things. Lousy for anything to do with websites.

liquidise 3y ago
Flash was excellent for making buttons grow/shrink. So much so that many sites had flash-based navs driving static html pages in the top row of their table layouts. Flash had its share of footguns in terms of code organization, but animating interaction was never a weak point.
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  > Flash was excellent for making buttons grow/shrink. So much so that many sites had flash-based navs driving static html pages in the top row of their table layouts. Yeah, but it was a Frankensteinian bastard of a system. Pretty sure the accessibility of that was zero, and changing a link or adding a new button was never trivial. That was web-design for the worst reasons: for the designers and their clients, but not web-design for the users.
JoeyJoJoJr 3y ago
Wrong. There was Flex and MXML and it was amazing.

pjbster 3y ago

Hah! I feel exactly the same about Oracle Forms. Never heard of it? 'twas a client-server development IDE which was based on the idea of a "data block", a true-blue bona fide Active Record implementation out in the wild around 8-10 years before Martin Fowler coined the name. Even then the world seemed unaware until Rails arrived.

bandrami 3y ago
Allaire also had something similar in ColdFusion (holy crap am I dating myself here): call an array generator with a datasource as its backend and get an array of DB-backed objects you can iterate over.

RobotToaster 3y ago

I have the same feeling about web-assembly and Flash.