Lottie demonstrates two things:
- there's still tremendous demand for a product like Flash, an easy interface for non-technical creatives to build animations
- building / compiling to web standards is highly suboptimal and we need binary formats special purposed for animation
There is already a very suitable format: SVG. Unfortunately it's not proprietary enough for some people.
SVG has some serious flaws. How do you preserve fonts when saving an SVG image, and still keep the text editable? Currently as I understand the only way to display text is to convert the text to Bezier path.
Also what I hate about SVG is that it requires a whole browser to display because it can contain CSS and JS.
Both these facts hint that it was designed only for embedding into websites, and is not ready for standalone use. Maybe we need a new format for vector graphics that doesn't require a browser.
It's not performant enough for what we want to do, and the constellation of "standards" around it are ill-fitting, awkward, and difficult to use.
We need a binary format special purposed for the task. Not CSS and literal XML and Javascript.
None of this is accessible to the animator. Some programmer bro can pick it up, but nothing has ever been as simple and as easy to use as Flash.
Why is it "not performant"? It is basically a set of bezier curves, just like other vector standards.
What is really bad that it is based on W3C technologies and requires a browser to display.