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by wongarsu 105 days ago
SVG + CSS + JS was hailed as the Flash-killer. But authoring tools never materialized. The tech stack can render the same things, but the process of creating anything beyond a static image in SVG is night and day compared to making the same thing in Flash
2 comments
ecocentrik 105 days ago
Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS but it just took a knee because so many people hated flash for all of its warts by the time SVG and Canvas moved vector graphics rendering to the browser. Flash was a real pain the ass for most web users and Web 2.0 technologies did kill it.
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Someone 105 days ago
> Flash should have transitioned into an authoring tool for SVG + CSS + JS

Didn’t it? IIRC, Adobe had such a tool at some moment, and part of it seems to (somewhat) live on [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Flex:

“Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. […] Adobe donated Flex to the Apache Software Foundation

[…]

In 2014, the Apache Software Foundation started a new project called FlexJS to cross-compile ActionScript 3 to JavaScript to enable it to run on browsers that do not support Adobe Flash Player and on devices that do not support the Adobe AIR runtime. In 2017, FlexJS was renamed to Apache Royale. The Apache Software Foundation describes the current iteration of Apache Royale as an open-source frontend technology that allows a developer to code in ActionScript 3 and MXML and target web, mobile devices and desktop devices on Apache Cordova all at once”

[1] I may be wrong though. It’s not easy figuring out what Flash code ended up in which of Adobe’s Flash-like products over time.

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hobofan 105 days ago
I think Rive[0] is quite competitive with what was possible back then in covering the full authoring stack.

[0]: https://rive.app

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