But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s actually being done in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative pages on the web. Picture that personality type. What place does it have in the universe of websites that we visit today?
The answer, as far as I’ve seen: user. We spend time on a smaller number of sites/platforms. The design of those sites tends to be (at its best) streamlined and optimized. And people who want to share their creativity are given little frames within that structure.
Even personal websites are usually built through WordPress, Squarespace, or similar. Something has been lost. I’m not going to say things are worse nowadays. That would be too sweeping a judgment, even if I substantially agreed with it, and I think I don’t. But I get this weird feeling when I spend time online, like it’s a tree that died some time ago, but it’s being reinforced, made to stand straighter than ever, given artificial leaves that never turn, etc.
We know there are better technologies security wise and performance wise. It's not always about what is 'technically' better rather than something that people enjoyed using and opened the door to creative personalities for the web. There is a time and a place for both and I think there has been neglect for the other side of the brain.
contestable. html5 games can be choppy in ways flash was not. even streaming video was pretty fast, comparing it to something like webrtc multi-party video. Hell even basic text-based chat like slack is a resource hog in html.
I personally find that mode of development distasteful, and I don’t share the author’s affection for this particular breed of "creativity," but anyway it was there and some folks liked it and there’s a real opportunity for someone who wants to reimagine it.
- you had types, performance was important so you had generic types like Vector , the code was compiled and it was really fast
- there were built-in efficient GUI widgets, you could have a list or table connected to a data provider with tousends of items but the components were smart and only created enough UI widgets as needed to render, where in HTML you either have to create a LI element for all your 10000 elements, create pagination(is not built in), create infinite scrolling(not built-in)
- it was super easy to customize or extend the provided things if you needed , as an example in HTML look at the <select> it is not customizable, everyone has to implement it's own using divs, css and js , but everyone gets it wrong in the corner case(you have issues where the dropdown pops outside the screen, missing events, hell even youtube search box sometimes breaks and the dropdown popup remains stuck open, so even Google engineerscan't create a working dropdown component
- performance, remember when a blinking cursor was causing an electron editor to use a lot of resources , the issue with web is that was designed in rush for showing documents.
- layouting components was super easy , theming was easy - with css in large old projects there are so many issues( I know people use less but this is not standard )
I have some solutions too, browsers need to provide more powerful components, if we want to do RIAs or desktop apps then we need the same components that desktop toolkits offer with the same customization. Other issue I seen was in a project where the devs ahd to import a third party library because the scrollbars can't be themed in all browsers , I am not refering to the right side of the browser ones(I know sme people hate if you change those) but scrollbars on a list or dropdown component. So you have projects where you import 1 lib for scrollbars, 1 lib for modals, 1 for fancy buttons and inputs, 1 for drag and drop, 1 for calendar widgets, 1 for dropdown that allows you to have icon + text, and of course a framework like angular or react . Browsers should check what developers need the most and add that as standard( ex better dropdowns) you would still have the ability to make your own shit and use your preferred framework
Someone with artistic talent could quickly learn flash and get something bizarre working very quickly. Drop the minimally skilled into a modern development environment and novelty is much harder. 95% of the time that’s probably a good thing, but it sucked a lot of the fun out of the internet.
In terms of capabilities though there was much less worry about compatibility.
ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ?
Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc...
with flash, there is only one single way things look across all platforms.
A consistent display was a nice thing to count on when making little games, applets and ads. However for general web layout it made accessibility features difficult to impossible to implement.
I'd also add that behaviour wasn't always consistent. There would still be OS/environment specific bugs that would crop up from time to time. (Though granted, these would rarely be related to rendering or layout)
well, that was not the point of flash, was it ?
And make it streamable. No, your fancy JSON over Websocket is not exactly streamable.
Still, I don't think we have an adequate replacement, even it would be technically possible, I don't know about similar tools for vector animations..