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Comment on The demise of Flash didn't bring any big HTML5/JS equivalent for watching animations; fast internet and better video compression made those types of animations become raster videos as well

PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

The problem isn’t animation - as you said there is raster video and also animated SVGs.

The problem is that there is no way to package interactive content like there was. Flash wasn’t just animation, it was also games. And even flash animations often had interactive bits, like homestar runner Easter eggs.

You can technically do it with JavaScript and HTML, but it’s difficult now and unfeasible back when flash died. Not only did the tools not exist, but html didn’t even have things like canvas yet for the tools to use.

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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
That’s not really true. You can do animation in HTML5 just like you could in flash. In fact, there are even quite a few ways you can acomplish the same.

HTML5 + JS

CSS + JS

There are multiple flash player projects running in WASM or JS

Animated SVG + JS

All of that allows for animation, games and interactivity, no problem.

There are dozens of tools that allow you to build flash-like animation and package it easily. Tons of game engines allow to export to HTML5, just at the press of a button. And there are still websites hosting browser games that fill that spot. There’s even HTML5 browser games that run in VR.

But there are two big caveats:

With much more performance, storage and internet bandwidth, there’s no reason to go for flash-style skeletal animations. That’s not because it’s not possible, but because we have better alternatives.

Nobody hosts their own websites anymore and most platforms (large ones like Youtube, Facebook or Reddit, but also small ones like Lemmy) don’t allow you to just upload whatever HTML5 code you want. So if you want to reach more people, you’ll just upload a video instead.
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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Sorry if this sounds a bit defensive, it’s frustrating when someone writes a novel telling you’re wrong but didn’t spend the time to read what you wrote first.
  
  I didn’t say it’s not possible.
  I said that back when flash functionally died, it wasn’t feasible.
  HTML 5 was barely supported by browsers. HTML 5 canvas had no support at all. WASM didn’t have any support. Having flash animators and flash game devs manually code the JavaScript and HTML just wasn’t realistic, and no tools existed at the time to span the gap.
  
  Now it is a little easier with things like canvas, and more importantly now there are tools that animators can use and export as a webpage.
  But in the intervening years, all the flash hosting websites died. Even newgrounds is a ghost of what it was. So even if the tools are there, the communities are all gone. Animators just export to video now, because that’s where the viewers are.
  
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  - squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    You mean in 2021 HTML5 was barely supported by browsers? Adobe ended support for Flash Player on 31th December 2020.
    
    For comparison, the original HTML5 W3C recommendation was retired in 2018 and even Version 5.3 was retired less than a month after Flash Player was retired.
    
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    PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Functionally. Functionally. I said functionally for a reason. I didn’t just add that word in because I liked how it looked.
    
    When was the last time you actually saw flash content?
    Browser extension support deteriorated. It never worked on iOS. People stopped making flash content because folks couldn’t view it long before it officially became unsupported.
    
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