[grishka]

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity?

Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear boundary between the document and the application parts.

Did the particular (Adobe's proprietary) implementation of Flash player suck? Yes, sure. Could this have been done better? Yes, sure. Is it possible to reimplement a Flash player from scratch within a reasonable timeframe with a small team of developers? Yes, sure, Ruffle[1] is a thing, and it's being actively developed.

I miss Flash. I hope it makes a comeback eventually.

[1] https://ruffle.rs

[rektide]

This sort of "wouldnt it be great to have some other thing, so we can murder the rest of the web platform" is so grotesque to me, just repugnant & vile & cruel.

Flash is a comedically shit technology. There's a couple animation capabilities it had that were nice & simple & people adore it endlessly for that. But Flash hated users, gave them nothing, no power (alike a native app) & was a big proprietary anti-hypermedia ball of jank, and it had the most trashfire craptastic lack of accessibility one could ever imagine.

This desire to keep hypermedia down, to create hard walls between different purposes of apps... it feels poisonous & misguided. There is too much of the web today thay does abuse client side code too much. But frankly it rarely affects most people, there's still viable techniques for manipulating it (except for Flutter's CanvasKit which is an abomination more cursed than Flash), and honestly, we're still getting better at webdev, still learning, still emerging better libraries & best practices, & generally the urge to do better is here & slowly happening.

There's some really dark takes that we have to save the web from apps. That we should bring back Flash is one of the most unforutnate least justified most tragic hot takes I've heard though.

[gmueckl]

Your rant is focused so much on the actual implementation details of Flash that it misses the point that the abstract concept of a VM based application container/sandbox could have been a great thing. In fact, it was such a great idea that browser developers were forced into a pretty tough struggle to actually kill it in order to stay relevant themselves. Adobe's poor stewardship sealed the deal, not conceptual shortcomings.

[MrJohz]

Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. The difference is that JavaScript has more ready access to the DOM, but Flash was also able to do that, it just used JavaScript as a bridge.

[grishka]

The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...

[rektide]

Having a hypermedia standard is universes more interesting & powerful & enriching than what boils dowm to a way to generate gifs. Computers have dozens of ways to throw pixels at peoplecs faces and none of them are remarkable or particularly noteable.

Having a DOM, having structure, having a hypermedium is a source of immense potential & power. For both developer, but also, capitally & uniquely, for users too.

This longer top-commemt talks some to why documents, why hypermedia is enriching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373988

[DeathArrow]

>Having a DOM, having structure, having a hypermedium is a source of immense potential & power.

For documents, yes. For apps those are obstacles. Apps just need something to draw on.

[MrJohz]

You still have the canvas, and it's perfectly easy to draw on that and handle events in JavaScript. There are a number of applications that work that way.

That said I disagree with the idea that using the DOM is bad - I suspect it's cumbersome to you mainly because you're not used to it. The number one benefit of the DOM is that user-facing controls are largely consistent. If I want the user to type text into a text box, I can just use a browser-defined element, and the user will be able to interact with that exactly as they expect. I don't need to reimplement the whole text input and display process, because it already exists in the platform. The same goes for all sorts of controls and interactions, from zooming to select boxes.

Moreover, assuming this DOM is built up in a way where the semantics are embedded in the elements themselves, then it can also be used in different ways. One user might use their browser to render the DOM into something that can see on their screen, while another might use their browser to read the element contents aloud. One person might use their mouse to interact with the system while another might use their keyboard. Accessibility is built into every application built using the DOM - it may not be ideally presented in some situations, and it's still possible to get things wrong, but by default a blind user will at least have a chance of using the system. In contrast, a canvas-based application will need to reimplement accessibility from the ground up (usually in the form of a secondary hidden DOM tree).

[discreteevent]

Exactly. When I first did a web front end it felt exactly like customising MS Word with VBA. No matter what you put on top of it the roots poke their heads through and it feels like a mess.

[grishka]

Yes, yes. Flash (with AS3) was a first-class web application platform. There were buttons and views and "movie clips" and other stuff for you to place on a blank canvas, all very customizable. Then there was Flex, a full-fledged yet relatively lightweight application framework built on that foundation. You created your layouts with XML, with live preview. There were Android-like layout containers (emulating Android's LinearLayout with HTML+CSS is still not quite trivial in 2022 — the defaults on flexbox are bonkers) and there were ListView/(UI|NS)CollectionView-style lists with reusable cells, among other things. This was 15 years ago! I can't even begin to imagine how many workarounds one would need to implement a list with reusable cells with HTML+JS even if targeting only the latest Chrome and Firefox.

HTML is a document format at its heart and there's no getting around that, but <object> is/was a nice escape hatch.

[DeathArrow]

>Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox.

JS is unfit for the task. It is a dynamic scripting language introduced by Netscape for the only purpose of adding a bit of interactivity to web pages, not to create large apps.

.NET and Java are much better for the task. The VMs support better languages with better libraries and more sane ecosystems. And the performance would be much better than that of JS.

And is easier to write an application using Xamarin or MAUI then using React.

When you write Java or .NET apps you write to target a computer which is a much better model for the apps then Web.

With "app languages" you can write apps better, faster while having better performance and more capabilities than using dynamic scripting languages like Javascript, Lua or Python.

Operating systems and browsers are apps too. And we don't use Javascript to write them.

You can write anything in any Turing complete language. But you'll be a fool if you attempt it for anything but fun.

[MrJohz]

I think what your describing is mainly your preference - which isn't in itself a bad thing, the lack of real diversity in browser scripting is a problem that is slowly being solved as WASM becomes a more viable target.

That said, some of your statements seem to be simply false. Javascript engines are at this point about as heavily optimised as Java and .NET runtimes, and a quick scan through a few benchmark sights seems to indicate that, with a few exceptions, the two perform similarly well. Certainly, there is no guarantee that a naïve implementation in Java will necessarily be faster than a similar one in Javascript, in the way one night expect with e.g. C and Python.

Moreover, JavaScript is regularly used in all sorts of applications and systems - Gnome, for example, uses JavaScript for various plugins and utilities, an increasing number of applications are written using Electron or other webview-based technologies, even browsers use JavaScript for a significant number of controls (e.g. the devtools for most browsers are written in JavaScript). So clearly a lot of people see value in writing all sorts of applications in JavaScript.

The rest of your complaints seem to be largely your opinion - again, perfectly valid, but other people will have different opinions, and so the value proposition for JavaScript will be different for them. For example, for me, building something in React is a cinch, whereas Xamarin would take a lot more work. And the ecosystem of JavaScript may not be perfect, but it's very well oriented towards building front-end apps, something that isn't as true of Java.

[gmueckl]

JavaScript VMs are inherently hampered by language design choices in JS. The dynamic typing and prototype based objects limit JIT based optimization for the full JS massively. Java and .NET have fully static typing which allows their JITs to be completely certain when they are translating code. JS JITs constantly have to add overhead in the form of escape hatches to deoptimized code if e.g. expectations about variable types are being broken at runtime.

[grishka]

Yes. The standard itself (the swf file format, the AVM bytecode, etc) is actually open. To their credit, Adobe has all the relevant specs on their website.

[iamcurious]

Cool, since you are here , is there any flash editor clone?

That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.

[grishka]

None that I know of. Of course it would be nice to have an open-source editor as well, but an open-source player is much more important. You can get by with abandonware for the creation side of things, but you can't ask your site visitors to install abandonware that is known for an astonishing amount of scary vulnerabilities (if they use an OS that was supported in the first place).

[kixiQu]

https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ <-- I give these folks some money on Patreon because I feel like they're trying for the right thing

[chrischen]

Try https://tumult.com/hype/

[iamcurious]

Looks cool! But I don't own nor plan to own a mac.

[gitgud]

> I miss Flash. I hope it makes a comeback eventually.

Flash was great for developers, but terrible for users. The only good user experience was "flash games/animations" and even then they weren't responsive and a little clunky.

The Flash I remember was bloated "Flash" websites that had No HTML, No url paths, No SEO metadata, Terrible for accessibility.... but it was easy to develop for I guess...

[DeathArrow]

Why not just use Java and .NET? They have pretty capable VMs which support lots of languages: Java, Python, Clojure, C#, F#, Visual Basic, Python, C++ and others.