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.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 weeks 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.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Again: HTML5 was supported way, way before flash disappeared.
caniuse.com/?search=canvas
That’s way before flash was discontinued. Except of on iOS, but smartphones were never the main platform for flash games/animation.
Flash-style skeletal animation was a result of technical limitations, not a deliberate art choice. The thing that killed flash-style animation was (a) the availability of better things like full-motion rasterized video and (b) the internet moving away from personal websites and towards big platforms, and almost all big platforms restricted the kind of content you can post to text, images and video.
insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
A vector video format does exist: animated SVG. It has all the features you claim are missing.
But nobody uses it because it is much more complicated to do than rasterized video and has no relevant advantages.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Idk how old you are but it feels like you’re just looking up dates without really understanding what it was like.
I did flash animation.
I am a developer (I prefer backend but we all have to do some web).
I was an adult during that time.
The textbook dates don’t tell the story. I’m telling you that flash died long before support ended. I’m telling you that replacement tools didn’t exist yet. I’m telling you that getting flash artists to try to animation using JavaScript was not feasible. It’s crazy to me that you think that the existence of a basic canvas support means that artists had an realistic path to making their art.
Smartphones weren’t the main platform for flash, and that’s why it died early.
You’ve got a skewed view of what flash was used to animate. People made absolutely beautiful flash. Just like all art, there is good and bad. Flash made it accessible enough that bad amateurs could produce reasonable animations.
Rasterized video was not better. What a crazy thing to say.
Personal websites? You think that people mostly consumed flash animation and games from personal websites??? Where did you get this from?
It feels like you’re reading this from a timeline of major events instead of having lived it.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Dude, I’be been developing HTML apps from 2008 on. Early HTML5 browser support was literally my job at that time.
You seem to have totally ignored the next gen tech at that time and now you can’t remember what happened back then.
And now you are basing your whole argumentation on “you must be a kid”.
Kiddo, I’m likely pretty much the same age as you.
You were the one who brought up canvas support. By 2015 you could export full 3D games made in Unity to HTML5. And that was certainly not the first, there were literally dozens of other engines that allowed export to HTML5/WebGL at that time.
If you are too young to remember, that’s not my problem, little child.
Flash died because people moved to a better, more future-proof stack. And you claiming that little 2D animations in Flash were technically much, much better than full 3D rendering with GPU support is honestly wild.
(If you want to get offensive because you don’t have arguments, fine, I can get offensive too, little child.)