5 ms·

SVG started as an open competitor to Shockwave/Flash Player and also an application format for PDAs. It almost got networking support once.

echelon 1y ago
Too bad nothing has ever come close to replacing the SWF format. You could pack so much into a single binary distributable media file. Games, videos, websites, infographics, tools, chat rooms. SWF was brilliant and it should have thrived.
- unleaded 1y ago
  absolutely. really is strange that you used to be able to download a music video in less than 2-3mb with lossless video quality, but now that's not really a thing anymore. I feel like if Adobe didn't get greedy and encourage its use for absolutely everything (and/or web standards got up to speed faster) people wouldn't wouldn't approach talking about Flash with the 10-foot pole they often do today (as a platform—not how everyone talks about how much they loved flash games)
  - viraptor 1y ago
    People loved the games, but not the super custom flash based menu that requires a loading bar and works totally different and slightly janky on each website.
    - philsnow 1y ago
      A time before HIGs.. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03/macromedia-flashdance https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03/macromedia-fla...
  - comex 1y ago
    What do you mean by “HD music video”? If you mean a literal video, then today’s video and audio codecs are more efficient than what Flash used, not less. If the music videos were that small then they must have given up a lot in quality. If you mean a Flash vector animation, then that’s different of course, but that doesn’t describe a typical music video.
    - kccqzy 1y ago
      Conventional video codecs are also pretty good at compressing animations. I once made a multi-minute animation of a plane taking off and H.264 compresses it to hundreds of kilobytes.
    - unleaded 1y ago
      yes i mean vectors, of course theres some cheating to reach that figure ;)
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    That's because people have more bandwidth today and therefore videos online are higher quality now. You can easily transcode a music video to 3MB using modern codecs (and even not so modern ones like H.264), and it will look somewhat worse than typical online video sites but still pretty good.
  - mxfh 1y ago
    What do you mean? Lossless animations with a soundtrack or some embeded video? This is 570k and runs in a webassembly runtime: https://archive.org/details/flash_badger https://archive.org/details/flash_badger SVG could do that too. Minimal javascript plus audio tags. http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg
    - unleaded 1y ago
      >badger.swf yes stuff like that & the IOSYS MVs. you technically can do stuff like that today theres nothing stopping you from doing it with svgs but i meant more the social part of it. its just interesting that if you want to do the same thing (put an animated video on the inernet) the usual way its now 10x bigger yet looks worse. also i dont think theres anything like Flash (the authoring software) but for SVGs. i hope there is one but for now I wouldnt say inkscape + a text editor counts
  - tiagod 1y ago
    Honestly, we can have that today. The real power of Flash was the fully integrated development environment. It was one of the first programming experiences I had, and all I needed to do amazing stuff was a book and a copy of Flash MX.
    - kccqzy 1y ago
      One of my own first programming experiences was when my dad bought me a copy of Dreamweaver and a book about it. To this day I still ponder what might have happened if I was instead given a copy of Flash instead.
  - acdha 1y ago
    Adobe needed to take Flash seriously as a platform. Instead they neglected it, making it synonymous with crashes and security problems, and they milked developers as much as possible. I bought Flash once. I found a crashing bug and jumped through hoops reporting it. A year or so later, they updated the ticket to suggest I drop $800 for the privilege of seeing whether it had been fixed. I did not make the mistake of giving them money ever again. They had such an opportunity to take advantage of a platform with a pre-iPhone deployment in the high 90% range, and they just skimped it into oblivion. What a disgrace for everyone who actually cared.
    - kccqzy 1y ago
      Yes seriously. At that time Steve Jobs was harping on HTML5 and CSS3 being open standards but Flash not. Adobe could have ensured Flash's survival by making Flash an open standard (much like it has made PDF an open standard where the specification is free to everyone) and making Adobe Flash only one of the possible authoring tools, and the Flash Player only one of the player tools. Basically they should have invited the community and other companies to make more Flash tooling while continuing to sell their own. Given how often I see people still paying for Acrobat Pro today, I think this is a good business strategy too.
  - xp84 1y ago
    What else was wildly cool about Flash was that the player itself was a shockingly tiny download -- even on 56K it was an incredibly fast download, and because we were all using MSIE then, the installation of this ActiveX thing that was the Flash Player required like one quick click and it was installed, and in 5 seconds you were seeing the Flash content. Obviously the fact that it was that low-friction to install any non-sandboxed application code was a very naïve thing to allow, but I still have to hand it to the Macromedia developers for packing the whole player into such a tiny download and making it so frictionless. I'm pretty sure that had a HUGE impact on its adoption over say, Java applets. Java took a lot more time and effort to install, and while it had decent penetration (many "chat room" services and in-browser games like Yahoo Games used Java) it was never taken for granted that 'everyone has it' the way Flash was (until Steve Jobs singlehandedly burned that assumption to the ground with fire).
- qwertox 1y ago
  If it weren't for Adobe's crappy support of the player, I would agree, but they did much more harm than good with it. It was a massive attack surface and they didn't care about closing their zero-day drive-by exploits in a sensible timeframe. Also they were basically the founders of persistent fingerprinting via Flash cookies. So no, thank you, I'm more than happy it didn't thrive more than it already did.
- felizuno 1y ago
  SWF was simultaneously brilliant and a festering wound that required amputation, and I would have welcomed a replacement that wasn't the biggest attack surface on the internet. I too love Homestar Runner. IMO the fact that it belonged to Adobe was the biggest problem, if SWF had been managed by a more capable software org it could have been maintained in a way that kept it from getting banned from the internet. And remember, that's how bad it was - it got banned from the internet because it was absolutely indefensible to leave it around. SWF getting cancelled magically stopped every single family member I have from calling me with weird viruses and corruption they managed to stumble into. I saw more malicious code execution through SWF than I saw from my dumb little cousins torrenting sus ROMs and photoshop crackers. I'd rather not have it than have those problems persist.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Working as an eLearning dev around flash is what got me to completely disable it on my home computer... only in a VM, where I would reset after use was I ever using it. It was useful, but way too easy to abuse.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I'm still amazed that the Adobe buyout of Macromedia didn't see the Flash tooling used to target Manifest + SVG + JS/ES4/ActionScript3 as an evolution from the Flash format preceding it given their efforts with SVG prior to the buyout. I was really hoping they would pivot to creating great tooling around a more open format. Silverlight (MS) also had a chance around this time. In the end, that's just not what happened. I also feel there's no reason an offline web-app shouldn't be able to be packaged/zipped similarly, instead of just a caching mechanism around separate http(s) delivered files.
koakuma-chan 1y ago
Huh? SVG stands for scalable vector graphics.
- FateOfNations 1y ago
  Functionally, it can do a lot of the same things as SWF/Flash. Can do animations (see article) and it's scriptable using JavaScript for interactivity.
- tiagod 1y ago
  And JavaScript starts with Java. Naming is hard.
  - immibis 1y ago
    And is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation, so you better not write it down anywhere or the lawnmower will get you.
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Thank fuck it didn't. I can't fathom how quickly the obnoxious advertiser industrial complex would've grabbed hold of that and invented whole new genres of shoving products in our collective face.
- baq 1y ago
  as opposed to today...?
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    Look I'm not saying they aren't doing it now I'm just saying one less vector for it makes me happy
bawolff 1y ago
> It almost got networking support once. SVG support full javascript. It has networking support. (In web browsers the <img> tag allows only restricted subset, butbyou get the full thing with iframe)
- ameliaquining 1y ago
  I think the above comment refers to the proposal for SVG 1.2 (which never shipped) to include an API for opening raw network sockets: https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040510/#rawsocket https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040510/#rawsocket (It observes that this feature raises certain security risks, but promises to figure out by the next draft how to fix them. This of course never happened.) I recall Hixie had a funny rant about this, but I can't find it.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    Thanks, i wasn't aware of that. That is crazy.

echelon 1y ago

Too bad nothing has ever come close to replacing the SWF format. You could pack so much into a single binary distributable media file. Games, videos, websites, infographics, tools, chat rooms. SWF was brilliant and it should have thrived.

unleaded 1y ago
absolutely. really is strange that you used to be able to download a music video in less than 2-3mb with lossless video quality, but now that's not really a thing anymore. I feel like if Adobe didn't get greedy and encourage its use for absolutely everything (and/or web standards got up to speed faster) people wouldn't wouldn't approach talking about Flash with the 10-foot pole they often do today (as a platform—not how everyone talks about how much they loved flash games)
- viraptor 1y ago
  People loved the games, but not the super custom flash based menu that requires a loading bar and works totally different and slightly janky on each website.
  - philsnow 1y ago
    A time before HIGs.. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03/macromedia-flashdance https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03/macromedia-fla...
- comex 1y ago
  What do you mean by “HD music video”? If you mean a literal video, then today’s video and audio codecs are more efficient than what Flash used, not less. If the music videos were that small then they must have given up a lot in quality. If you mean a Flash vector animation, then that’s different of course, but that doesn’t describe a typical music video.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    Conventional video codecs are also pretty good at compressing animations. I once made a multi-minute animation of a plane taking off and H.264 compresses it to hundreds of kilobytes.
  - unleaded 1y ago
    yes i mean vectors, of course theres some cheating to reach that figure ;)
- kccqzy 1y ago
  That's because people have more bandwidth today and therefore videos online are higher quality now. You can easily transcode a music video to 3MB using modern codecs (and even not so modern ones like H.264), and it will look somewhat worse than typical online video sites but still pretty good.
- mxfh 1y ago
  What do you mean? Lossless animations with a soundtrack or some embeded video? This is 570k and runs in a webassembly runtime: https://archive.org/details/flash_badger https://archive.org/details/flash_badger SVG could do that too. Minimal javascript plus audio tags. http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg
  - unleaded 1y ago
    >badger.swf yes stuff like that & the IOSYS MVs. you technically can do stuff like that today theres nothing stopping you from doing it with svgs but i meant more the social part of it. its just interesting that if you want to do the same thing (put an animated video on the inernet) the usual way its now 10x bigger yet looks worse. also i dont think theres anything like Flash (the authoring software) but for SVGs. i hope there is one but for now I wouldnt say inkscape + a text editor counts
- tiagod 1y ago
  Honestly, we can have that today. The real power of Flash was the fully integrated development environment. It was one of the first programming experiences I had, and all I needed to do amazing stuff was a book and a copy of Flash MX.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    One of my own first programming experiences was when my dad bought me a copy of Dreamweaver and a book about it. To this day I still ponder what might have happened if I was instead given a copy of Flash instead.
- acdha 1y ago
  Adobe needed to take Flash seriously as a platform. Instead they neglected it, making it synonymous with crashes and security problems, and they milked developers as much as possible. I bought Flash once. I found a crashing bug and jumped through hoops reporting it. A year or so later, they updated the ticket to suggest I drop $800 for the privilege of seeing whether it had been fixed. I did not make the mistake of giving them money ever again. They had such an opportunity to take advantage of a platform with a pre-iPhone deployment in the high 90% range, and they just skimped it into oblivion. What a disgrace for everyone who actually cared.
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    Yes seriously. At that time Steve Jobs was harping on HTML5 and CSS3 being open standards but Flash not. Adobe could have ensured Flash's survival by making Flash an open standard (much like it has made PDF an open standard where the specification is free to everyone) and making Adobe Flash only one of the possible authoring tools, and the Flash Player only one of the player tools. Basically they should have invited the community and other companies to make more Flash tooling while continuing to sell their own. Given how often I see people still paying for Acrobat Pro today, I think this is a good business strategy too.
- xp84 1y ago
  What else was wildly cool about Flash was that the player itself was a shockingly tiny download -- even on 56K it was an incredibly fast download, and because we were all using MSIE then, the installation of this ActiveX thing that was the Flash Player required like one quick click and it was installed, and in 5 seconds you were seeing the Flash content. Obviously the fact that it was that low-friction to install any non-sandboxed application code was a very naïve thing to allow, but I still have to hand it to the Macromedia developers for packing the whole player into such a tiny download and making it so frictionless. I'm pretty sure that had a HUGE impact on its adoption over say, Java applets. Java took a lot more time and effort to install, and while it had decent penetration (many "chat room" services and in-browser games like Yahoo Games used Java) it was never taken for granted that 'everyone has it' the way Flash was (until Steve Jobs singlehandedly burned that assumption to the ground with fire).
qwertox 1y ago
If it weren't for Adobe's crappy support of the player, I would agree, but they did much more harm than good with it. It was a massive attack surface and they didn't care about closing their zero-day drive-by exploits in a sensible timeframe. Also they were basically the founders of persistent fingerprinting via Flash cookies. So no, thank you, I'm more than happy it didn't thrive more than it already did.
felizuno 1y ago
SWF was simultaneously brilliant and a festering wound that required amputation, and I would have welcomed a replacement that wasn't the biggest attack surface on the internet. I too love Homestar Runner. IMO the fact that it belonged to Adobe was the biggest problem, if SWF had been managed by a more capable software org it could have been maintained in a way that kept it from getting banned from the internet. And remember, that's how bad it was - it got banned from the internet because it was absolutely indefensible to leave it around. SWF getting cancelled magically stopped every single family member I have from calling me with weird viruses and corruption they managed to stumble into. I saw more malicious code execution through SWF than I saw from my dumb little cousins torrenting sus ROMs and photoshop crackers. I'd rather not have it than have those problems persist.
- tracker1 1y ago
  Working as an eLearning dev around flash is what got me to completely disable it on my home computer... only in a VM, where I would reset after use was I ever using it. It was useful, but way too easy to abuse.
tracker1 1y ago
I'm still amazed that the Adobe buyout of Macromedia didn't see the Flash tooling used to target Manifest + SVG + JS/ES4/ActionScript3 as an evolution from the Flash format preceding it given their efforts with SVG prior to the buyout. I was really hoping they would pivot to creating great tooling around a more open format. Silverlight (MS) also had a chance around this time. In the end, that's just not what happened. I also feel there's no reason an offline web-app shouldn't be able to be packaged/zipped similarly, instead of just a caching mechanism around separate http(s) delivered files.

koakuma-chan 1y ago

Huh? SVG stands for scalable vector graphics.

FateOfNations 1y ago
Functionally, it can do a lot of the same things as SWF/Flash. Can do animations (see article) and it's scriptable using JavaScript for interactivity.
tiagod 1y ago
And JavaScript starts with Java. Naming is hard.
- immibis 1y ago
  And is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation, so you better not write it down anywhere or the lawnmower will get you.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

Thank fuck it didn't. I can't fathom how quickly the obnoxious advertiser industrial complex would've grabbed hold of that and invented whole new genres of shoving products in our collective face.

baq 1y ago
as opposed to today...?
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Look I'm not saying they aren't doing it now I'm just saying one less vector for it makes me happy

bawolff 1y ago

> It almost got networking support once. SVG support full javascript. It has networking support. (In web browsers the <img> tag allows only restricted subset, butbyou get the full thing with iframe)

ameliaquining 1y ago
I think the above comment refers to the proposal for SVG 1.2 (which never shipped) to include an API for opening raw network sockets: https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040510/#rawsocket https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20040510/#rawsocket (It observes that this feature raises certain security risks, but promises to figure out by the next draft how to fix them. This of course never happened.) I recall Hixie had a funny rant about this, but I can't find it.
- bawolff 1y ago
  Thanks, i wasn't aware of that. That is crazy.