[kernelPanicked]

I haven't been this impressed with CSS since csszengarden.com.

However, I have my doubts about animations. Keeps giving me flashbacks to ActionScript...and I already see comments indicating the site made their browser crash.

[novalis]

You used to dev in actionscript to do animation in flash and it crashed your browser everytime ?

[kernelPanicked]

I'm not sure if you want clarification, or you're a Flash fan and want to imply an ad hominem. I try to follow the principle of charity on the internet so here's clarification.

Flash seems like a crash-prone plugin. I recall Apple had data to back that up when they pulled support for it on iOS. Since I want assurance that my web code will run reliably in as many places it is deployed as possible, I don't look fondly on Flash/ActionScript (the old IDE wasn't my favorite either, no idea how much that has improved over the years). I actually love the idea of a write-once-run-anywhere rich media platform, but in practice Flash had too many downsides, at least for my work.

I'm not sure animations are a priority I'd set for CSS. I think it has bigger fish to fry. People want to push CSS toward being more of a script language than a markup language, hence the new Webkit variables. I seem to hold an unpopular view but I think these things will complicate and possibly make CSS less attractive to use. I'd rather see CSS be improved syntatically, incorporating features natively like those SASS gives you. (EDIT: to clarify the apparent contradiction, SASS has "variables" but they are really immutable constants, very different from what the CSS var RQs specify)

[novalis]

Let me explain, I found it comical that you could actually be the worst flash dev ever, based on what you stated. It was the best interpretation, without touching the irrational side of it.

"Keeps giving me flashbacks to ActionScript". That is a weird variation for a sort of, by now, stereptyped tirade on the subject of Flash and that has some implications. But I'll get to that in a minute.

First, this is what you were trying to recall. The "data to back that up", I am sorry to say, the data doesn't "back that up". It was a WWDC 2009 keynote address by a apple senior vp that talked about some data, pinned on flash through biased analysis. It was data taken from desktop browsers crash reports. It is at the foundation of a bias that is useful for some even today.

The bias is explained in detail in a daringfireball.net post: "Flash’s number and severity of crashing bugs could well be somewhat low and it would still account for a large number of total crashes because it’s actually used all the time — by any Mac user with Flash content playing in a web page."

http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash A notoriously pro apple site with a balanced point of view on this matter, you probably should read it to get a better understanding, it will save you a lot of irritation and will probably ground you in reality on the matter.

Also, I don't know what sort of "ad hominem" coming from a "Flash fan" you saw there, but that line just speaks volumes in a passive aggressive way. You see I had to use the charity principle in the previous post too. That pointed me to be reading from a comically poor flash dev that had actually used "ActionScript" language and it crashed all the time, and was now having a verbal go at the past opressor dev plat. I could understand that, some devs are simply terrible.

The other option would be to consider that you are oblivious to Flash users never contacting with the code, "ActionScript" itself. You mentioned it in a specific way. See, I know that to be biased because there is actually no particular thing that will make "ActionScript" code crash just because it is ActionScript.

You most likely will get a lot of crashes from Flash IDE "designed" .swf files that don't have a line of human coded ActionScript in them. But you went there.

So I had to go the other way around it and see what you were on about while trying to find a character that would fit the odd meme based statements you displayed towards the subject.

But thank you for applying the charity principle ex post facto your original post. Clarification is always the best path.

[kernelPanicked]

Hey, you know, you do make some good points, and that was a good article. You're really astoundingly condescending and irritable, but I'm sure you're a smart person.

At the end of the day, I'll say "my bad" for conflating Flash and ActionScript. They're not the same thing at all. I am a frequent user of Javascript both in the browser and servers, so I look fondly on most ECMAScript variants. The language is distinct from its runtime environment, which is where I find my gripes. I'll also admit that my past use of Flash is both dated and was closer to a "script kiddie" experience than what I do now, and while I doubt I was the worst developer ever, I was probably making bad decisions by both of our standards today.

But therein lies, to me, the real problem with Flash. For the sake of constructive discussion, I will just concede all your points about the stability of the plugin -- since you did make good points about Apple's accusation, let's just grant the plugin is refined, secure, and stable. I think we can agree the easy publishing of the web enables bad developers all the time. They just write their shitty code, run it through bad or no QA, FTP it somewhere and boom, users are downloading and running it. This is bad enough with the HTML/CSS/JS stack. Flash exacerbates the problem by expanding the API handles available for shitty devs to put their shitty hands on. From the "user" point of view, where user is not either of us but someone who only wants technology to work for them, Flash comes with a lot more bad treatment than most things on the web. Dancing hamsters merely offend; bad Javascript can break a page load; but it takes a powerful plugin like Flash to really make your computer grind gears.

And that gets to the crux of my argument -- CSS animations. When you start adding powerful features like that to a web technology, you know it will be abused because the web is full of shitty developers. Style sheets using these features are already crashing people's browsers (and I looked at the source for those animations -- I don't think these guys are even hacks at all). That shouldn't be happening. The world needs a stable stack of web technologies that minimize the damage bad developers can do. And this is just talking about poor code; you know the danger that a sweeping API poses in the hand of a black hat...big nod to ActiveX there. I know, the assertion that we should limit technology to account for the lowest common denominator sounds ridiculous, but do you really know of any way to stop bad developers from getting their code to run on user's devices? They seem to persist no matter what!

Eh, I could go on. But no one is going to see this stuff at this point. I guess we'll see what the future holds, but I think bottom line...Flash had a good 10+ year run. It was a net benefit to the web. But there are things about it we ought not repeat, especially in other mature, dependable technologies, like CSS.