6 ms·

Looks like this was made in 1999. Say what you like about Flash, at least it still works 15 years later.

cardamomo 12y ago
Sure, but so does this: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- blowski 12y ago
  Even on iPhones (unlike the OP).
  - NicoJuicy 12y ago
    The OP doesn't work no more because Apple blocked Flash. Otherwhise, it would probably still be supported :)
    - randomblast 12y ago
      Blocked is the wrong word. It implies that Apple had to take some action to stop Flash from working, which would otherwise be the natural way of things.
      - tfinniga 12y ago
        I think it's fair to say that Apple blocked flash. They didn't implement flash in Safari, which is where you're right. But they also disallowed any interpreter on iOS, so even if Adobe wanted to make a flash player on iOS (there was a rumored prototype), it wouldn't be allowed in the app store anyway.
        blowski 12y ago
        And I, for one, am glad that they did. I understand why stuff like this had to be made in Flash in 1999, but in 2014, client-side web development is in a much better place. When Apple blocked Flash on iPhones, we were forced to adopt and improve open standards instead of relying on proprietary software.
        CmonDev 12y ago
        Now we are doomed to use idea-monopolic closed ecosystem of legacy languages (HTML, JS, CSS). I miss the truly open web of the past, the one where I could choose my client-side technology and my client-side programming language. I hope Google NaCl will save us.
        innguest 12y ago
        How is it that having to code in three different languages, all designed by committee, is "a much better place" than designing the graphical aspects of a website in an integrated environment that uses intuitive vector concepts that can be picked up by anyone? Maybe you're only considering one aspect of it, namely if it runs everywhere or drains certain batteries faster? I certainly had a lot more fun coding GUI on Flash than I've ever had with the three donkeyman of the apocalypse. It was a much higher level of abstraction than what can be provided by current tools.
        blowski 12y ago
        As a developer: * Because I can use any editor I like - free, open-source, paid, whatever. * Because I can build and use tools which are themselves built on top of the standards, and choose which tools I want (SASS, LESS, CoffeeScript, etc). * Because I can build responsive websites that work on screen sizes from watches to 60" TV screens. As IT support: * Because my users don't have to frequently upgrade a bit of software which most of the time offered little benefit, but big security risks. As a user: * Because I can use just about any browser I like, and (usually, at least) get at least some experience of the website more than "Sorry, you don't have Flash installed, so bugger off." * Because the user experience has become a lot more consistent. Weird navigation controls have become outliers rather than standard. I have no ideological opposition to Flash, more to the way it was used. While Flash was popular, the progress of open standards was slow because it was less urgent.
    - nailer 12y ago
      I used Flash on Android for three years and Playbook OS for one. Apple blocks Flash but that won't stop it being horrible on mobile devices.
mcescalante 12y ago
A nice little writeup about the site from summer 2000: http://www.thingsmagazine.net/text/t12/wordperhect.htm http://www.thingsmagazine.net/text/t12/wordperhect.htm
- cardamomo 12y ago
  Reading a little bit more about the artist's background and so on makes me wonder what such a project might look like if it were created today.
- cardamomo 12y ago
  Along those lines, here's a description of the project from the commissioning organization, e-2.org: > As word processing software becomes ever more advanced, correcting syntax and spelling errors, these familiar programmes begin to impose a standardised corporate language onto our writing. > Takahashi has produced her own fully functioning online version which undermines this dehumanising process. Reclaiming the initiative back from the software, Word Perhect presents an idiosyncratic hand-drawn interface leading to a set of functioning but strangely altered tools. http://www.e-2.org/commissions/wordperhect.html http://www.e-2.org/commissions/wordperhect.html
- quink 12y ago
  And yet more: http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/index.php?id=48 http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/index.php?i...
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
And it continues to be the #1 language for all the mainstream game web sites. Flash is not going anywhere any time soon.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Unity 3d exporting to js/webgl is one of the death knells. A decent js/webgl authoring environment written in js/webgl cannot be too far off.
  - dsirijus 12y ago
    What Adobe got right with Flash (and Blender unfortunately failed to do for 3D) was entire self-contained production pipeline within a single product. You get to fire up Flash IDE, draw in it, layout in it, add scripts to it, debug there, test, publish, and voila - game done. This led to huge productivity/creativity boosts and single-man chop shops. I had my little hybrid Tablet PC back in 2008 where I'd fire up Adobe Flash IDE, get to draw on it with a pen with pressure sensitivity and custom brushes, swivel to PC mode, get to some coding, attach scripts, debug some, and get my game prototype up in few hours with decent hand-drawn art. Hell, I remember fully completing (to production binary, with zero or very little tweaks afterwards) some adver-games in under 3 hours. Imagine that - you need just a single application to do absolutely _everything_ in order to publish a successful game. Fast. I'm still waiting for anything even remotely close to that in terms of both quality and features, on _any_ other technological platform for game development, lest one that was immediately deployable to >99% of potential customers.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      You have a very good point there, though to be fair Macromedia got that right and then Adobe proceeded to screw it up. Adobe never liked the idea of using a single application, they like to sell people a range.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
nailer 12y ago
On Windows desktops (a tiny portion of current web browsers) maybe. Can't view it here and I suspect I'm not alone.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  What OS are you using? It runs fine on my Fedora Linux machine. Admittedly, I did just install the latest Flash yesterday because I got tired of Facebook videos not working (I kept wanting to watch videos friends had posted about the cop murdering an unarmed kid in Ferguson). I don't like or trust Flash very much, but it does work pretty well on Linux these days.
  - deathanatos 12y ago
    > I don't like or trust Flash very much, but it does work pretty well on Linux these days. I'm on Gentoo, and technically I could view this in Firefox, so I suppose it works. However, I'm in Chrome at the moment, and in a recent version of Chrome they decided to drop NPAPI support, so plugins (including Flash) no longer function. Technically, they replaced the NPAPI Flash with Pepper Flash (Pepper being a new plugin API, I think); when I upgraded to the version of Chrome that did all this, it was still masked in Gentoo, so it wouldn't install without me specifically unmasking it… which I didn't. This could just be my distro, of course, though Gentoo is quite wonderful for other reasons. It does appear they've unmasked it, so whenever I next upgrade, I can get it. Even on non-Gentoo, I still feel like there are some hoops to jump through to get it. Distros typically can't offer it in their package repos, due to the license, right? (It's the same with proprietary music/video codecs last I checked.) Point being, it requires work just to make it work. HTML doesn't require that. It has made me use Firefox more recently, however.
    - SwellJoe 12y ago
      I also prefer HTML5, and would hope that nobody is building new products for Flash today. I waited months from my last OS install to add Flash to this system...partly because I distrust Adobe, and partly because I didn't want the hassle of dealing with upgrades. Also, it used to be ornery to use Flash on a 64 bit system, requiring installation of 32 bit libraries (which yum/RPM handles fine, except during OS upgrades)...and I was afraid that was still the case. But, that issue is gone, and they provide a 64 bit build.
ghshephard 12y ago
...except that it doesn't. Even Adobe had stopped supporting it on the mobile platform.
symmetricsaurus 12y ago
Well, that explains the horrible JPG quality.
allegory 12y ago
Well actually it doesn't for me. It says "you need flash" which is a sod because I'm sitting on a Sun Ultra 60 which doesn't have Flash...
unfamiliar 12y ago
And the interface graphics are even retina ready!
Eiriksmal 12y ago
That is certainly a feat, but I think the more impressive part of this project is funding the web domain and server for 15 years! In another recent HN article concerning the "screenshot all the things" guy, someone mentioned that they continually run across bookmarks they've saved from interesting sites only two or three years old that now 404--not to mention links from blog posts more than a year or two old. [Which brings to mind StackExchange. (Socially) enforcing that users copy an answer's text from an external website for future posterity is brilliant.]
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Web archive usually works for links that have broken. But link rot is a serious problem: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link-rot http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link-rot >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al. (2005) discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year. >Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; the Internet Archive has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

Sure, but so does this: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

blowski 12y ago
Even on iPhones (unlike the OP).
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  The OP doesn't work no more because Apple blocked Flash. Otherwhise, it would probably still be supported :)
  - randomblast 12y ago
    Blocked is the wrong word. It implies that Apple had to take some action to stop Flash from working, which would otherwise be the natural way of things.
    - tfinniga 12y ago
      I think it's fair to say that Apple blocked flash. They didn't implement flash in Safari, which is where you're right. But they also disallowed any interpreter on iOS, so even if Adobe wanted to make a flash player on iOS (there was a rumored prototype), it wouldn't be allowed in the app store anyway.
      - blowski 12y ago
        And I, for one, am glad that they did. I understand why stuff like this had to be made in Flash in 1999, but in 2014, client-side web development is in a much better place. When Apple blocked Flash on iPhones, we were forced to adopt and improve open standards instead of relying on proprietary software.
        CmonDev 12y ago
        Now we are doomed to use idea-monopolic closed ecosystem of legacy languages (HTML, JS, CSS). I miss the truly open web of the past, the one where I could choose my client-side technology and my client-side programming language. I hope Google NaCl will save us.
        innguest 12y ago
        How is it that having to code in three different languages, all designed by committee, is "a much better place" than designing the graphical aspects of a website in an integrated environment that uses intuitive vector concepts that can be picked up by anyone? Maybe you're only considering one aspect of it, namely if it runs everywhere or drains certain batteries faster? I certainly had a lot more fun coding GUI on Flash than I've ever had with the three donkeyman of the apocalypse. It was a much higher level of abstraction than what can be provided by current tools.
        blowski 12y ago
        As a developer: * Because I can use any editor I like - free, open-source, paid, whatever. * Because I can build and use tools which are themselves built on top of the standards, and choose which tools I want (SASS, LESS, CoffeeScript, etc). * Because I can build responsive websites that work on screen sizes from watches to 60" TV screens. As IT support: * Because my users don't have to frequently upgrade a bit of software which most of the time offered little benefit, but big security risks. As a user: * Because I can use just about any browser I like, and (usually, at least) get at least some experience of the website more than "Sorry, you don't have Flash installed, so bugger off." * Because the user experience has become a lot more consistent. Weird navigation controls have become outliers rather than standard. I have no ideological opposition to Flash, more to the way it was used. While Flash was popular, the progress of open standards was slow because it was less urgent.
  - nailer 12y ago
    I used Flash on Android for three years and Playbook OS for one. Apple blocks Flash but that won't stop it being horrible on mobile devices.

mcescalante 12y ago

A nice little writeup about the site from summer 2000: http://www.thingsmagazine.net/text/t12/wordperhect.htm http://www.thingsmagazine.net/text/t12/wordperhect.htm

cardamomo 12y ago
Reading a little bit more about the artist's background and so on makes me wonder what such a project might look like if it were created today.
cardamomo 12y ago
Along those lines, here's a description of the project from the commissioning organization, e-2.org: > As word processing software becomes ever more advanced, correcting syntax and spelling errors, these familiar programmes begin to impose a standardised corporate language onto our writing. > Takahashi has produced her own fully functioning online version which undermines this dehumanising process. Reclaiming the initiative back from the software, Word Perhect presents an idiosyncratic hand-drawn interface leading to a set of functioning but strangely altered tools. http://www.e-2.org/commissions/wordperhect.html http://www.e-2.org/commissions/wordperhect.html
quink 12y ago
And yet more: http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/index.php?id=48 http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/index.php?i...

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

And it continues to be the #1 language for all the mainstream game web sites. Flash is not going anywhere any time soon.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
Unity 3d exporting to js/webgl is one of the death knells. A decent js/webgl authoring environment written in js/webgl cannot be too far off.
- dsirijus 12y ago
  What Adobe got right with Flash (and Blender unfortunately failed to do for 3D) was entire self-contained production pipeline within a single product. You get to fire up Flash IDE, draw in it, layout in it, add scripts to it, debug there, test, publish, and voila - game done. This led to huge productivity/creativity boosts and single-man chop shops. I had my little hybrid Tablet PC back in 2008 where I'd fire up Adobe Flash IDE, get to draw on it with a pen with pressure sensitivity and custom brushes, swivel to PC mode, get to some coding, attach scripts, debug some, and get my game prototype up in few hours with decent hand-drawn art. Hell, I remember fully completing (to production binary, with zero or very little tweaks afterwards) some adver-games in under 3 hours. Imagine that - you need just a single application to do absolutely _everything_ in order to publish a successful game. Fast. I'm still waiting for anything even remotely close to that in terms of both quality and features, on _any_ other technological platform for game development, lest one that was immediately deployable to >99% of potential customers.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    You have a very good point there, though to be fair Macromedia got that right and then Adobe proceeded to screw it up. Adobe never liked the idea of using a single application, they like to sell people a range.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]

nailer 12y ago

On Windows desktops (a tiny portion of current web browsers) maybe. Can't view it here and I suspect I'm not alone.

SwellJoe 12y ago
What OS are you using? It runs fine on my Fedora Linux machine. Admittedly, I did just install the latest Flash yesterday because I got tired of Facebook videos not working (I kept wanting to watch videos friends had posted about the cop murdering an unarmed kid in Ferguson). I don't like or trust Flash very much, but it does work pretty well on Linux these days.
- deathanatos 12y ago
  > I don't like or trust Flash very much, but it does work pretty well on Linux these days. I'm on Gentoo, and technically I could view this in Firefox, so I suppose it works. However, I'm in Chrome at the moment, and in a recent version of Chrome they decided to drop NPAPI support, so plugins (including Flash) no longer function. Technically, they replaced the NPAPI Flash with Pepper Flash (Pepper being a new plugin API, I think); when I upgraded to the version of Chrome that did all this, it was still masked in Gentoo, so it wouldn't install without me specifically unmasking it… which I didn't. This could just be my distro, of course, though Gentoo is quite wonderful for other reasons. It does appear they've unmasked it, so whenever I next upgrade, I can get it. Even on non-Gentoo, I still feel like there are some hoops to jump through to get it. Distros typically can't offer it in their package repos, due to the license, right? (It's the same with proprietary music/video codecs last I checked.) Point being, it requires work just to make it work. HTML doesn't require that. It has made me use Firefox more recently, however.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    I also prefer HTML5, and would hope that nobody is building new products for Flash today. I waited months from my last OS install to add Flash to this system...partly because I distrust Adobe, and partly because I didn't want the hassle of dealing with upgrades. Also, it used to be ornery to use Flash on a 64 bit system, requiring installation of 32 bit libraries (which yum/RPM handles fine, except during OS upgrades)...and I was afraid that was still the case. But, that issue is gone, and they provide a 64 bit build.

ghshephard 12y ago

...except that it doesn't. Even Adobe had stopped supporting it on the mobile platform.

symmetricsaurus 12y ago

Well, that explains the horrible JPG quality.

allegory 12y ago

Well actually it doesn't for me. It says "you need flash" which is a sod because I'm sitting on a Sun Ultra 60 which doesn't have Flash...

unfamiliar 12y ago

And the interface graphics are even retina ready!

Eiriksmal 12y ago

That is certainly a feat, but I think the more impressive part of this project is funding the web domain and server for 15 years! In another recent HN article concerning the "screenshot all the things" guy, someone mentioned that they continually run across bookmarks they've saved from interesting sites only two or three years old that now 404--not to mention links from blog posts more than a year or two old. [Which brings to mind StackExchange. (Socially) enforcing that users copy an answer's text from an external website for future posterity is brilliant.]

Houshalter 12y ago
Web archive usually works for links that have broken. But link rot is a serious problem: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link-rot http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link-rot >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al. (2005) discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year. >Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; the Internet Archive has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).