> The forced move to CSS and the constellation of other "standards" still hasn't caught up to what Flash once offered us.
Hard disagree. Modern web apps can be amazing within the browser alone. Look at Figma or OnShape as class leading examples.
I think you’re also misunderstanding Lottie: For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about. It works well, too, so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
> so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
Because we are.
If you've ever used Flash, you know how easy and accessible it is to create.
The results were 100% portable and even downloadable. You could treat flash files like gifs or pngs.
The web document standards don't work that magically. They have never lived up to what you once could do.
> For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about.
Gross. I want a single, self-contained file that I can open on my computer without having to open a browser. Not an assortment of JavaScripts and css files.
Anything can be a "standard". The web standards are way too big. And they've accumulated decades of baggage.
Didn't you need proprietary flash player to play your flash file? I would rather run my animation/app/game in a browser than install something like that again.
The problem, as I see it, is that the Flash editing environment doesn't have a widely-accepted descendant, and the person you're responding to is right - there's not really a contemporary editor that is as easy - and more importantly: as potentially deep (as it was also shallow) - for non-techies to pick up and work with.
There are plenty of options today for technically-minded or 'computer people' to work with, but there's a dearth of options for the 'merely' creative to play around with and investigate.
A lot of the magic from the 'old' (mid?) web came from people who had very little initial interest in the technical nature of the solution from just going ahead and making Cool Shit™ anyway. Some of those people might then relish getting their hands grubbier and delving deeper into the technical guts (eg. Praystation et al).
- ed : for the record, at the time i was also critical of the proprietary nature of Flash.
I was a "flash developer" for some time around 2005, but the Flash environment (what was it called, Macromedia Flash?) never really "clicked" for me. I was able to put together some interactive visualizations and even little games, but it was not simple for me. That changed when Adobe Flex and ActionScript came along. That's where I felt right at home. But I'm fully aware Flash made much more sense for others than it did for me.
It needed a browser plugin, but as a developer you just needed to reference it in your object/embed tag. It wasn't something you needed to handle yourself. Most people had it installed already anyway.
Funny that you mention Figma because they literally built their own browser around the browser with C++, Rust and WASM because the current browser situation was untenable to the types of applications they wanted to make.
> within the browser alone
What do you mean by that? My understanding of the above suggestion is that the author dreamed of a world where something like flash would have become the standard, so part of the browser, without the (proprietary) extension.