[Animats]

Flash became unpopular partly because the authoring tools were very expensive and closed-source. They were, however, usable by real animators. People could, and did, do cartoons, not just spinning triangles. The bandwidth required was very low.

Flash's approach to animation, with an object stream and a timeline stream, was a good one; display could start without reading the entire stream, something the SVG/CSS/Javascript mess can't do.

Shockwave was even more advanced, with full 3D. For a year, Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine in the player, allowing full 3D games with physics, but Adobe didn't keep up the payments and it had to be removed.