> Are you kidding me? Flash was an absurdly popular platform. Careers were launched on Newgrounds!
I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but what do you think the percent spread was between sites that were fully driven by Flash vs not Flash?
I don't have the stats in front of me, but I would guess it was probably 2% Flash vs 98% non-Flash. Now, a lot of sites had sprinkles of Flash but very few sites in the grand scheme of things were solely rendered with Flash. Part of the 2% were sites like 2advanced studios.
> very few sites in the grand scheme of things were solely rendered with Flash
...yeah, because that's not what Flash was about. Flash was an application platform (ok, so more like an Animation platform) first and foremost. Why would anyone run their whole site in flash? It wasn't the right tool for that job.
> Flash was an application platform (ok, so more like an Animation platform) first and foremost. Why would anyone run their whole site in flash? It wasn't the right tool for that job.
And this is exactly what I'm trying to say.
Back in the day you would very likely reach for Flash if you wanted to build an FTP client that ran in a browser. Totally reasonable use case because that's a highly interactive app that doesn't really follow the request / response style of a document style page. But you likely wouldn't reach for Flash to build some type of site that presented data in a document style (pretty much the general use case of what a website outputs).
But if you fast forward to today's technology, some front end developers are bringing in the complexity of creating SPA style applications that are primarily rendered with JS for everything -- even document style websites like a personal blog and the original comment I replied to is hinting they want to remove constraints from browsers to give us more of a FFA style of doing whatever we want to render pages. I was just saying that model didn't really take off for the general use case with Flash decades ago.
Fortunately we still live in a time where web developers can choose what they want to do, but browsers shouldn't change the concept of being something that renders HTML that is optionally combined with other things like CSS, fonts, JS and images.
but most sites had some flash on their site. just like the previous person said: flash was never intended to replace the website entirely - flash was intended to supplement it. and that need went away with html5/css3, which is why it was deprecated as the insecure behemoth it was.
Yet people did this all the time (2advanced, HomestarRunner, etc) because the web as an application (a product) was served particularly well by an application platform.
But for every 2advanced studios there were tens of thousands of people not using Flash as their entire site.
If people really wanted a no constraints platform to build any UI they want with a blank slate then web development as we know it today would be a completely different environment.
Instead, 20 years later, we're still trucking along with HTML as being the primary focus, and everything else can be loaded as needed.
You can build some pretty amazing things today with a combination of HTML, CSS, JS, fonts and websockets. But at the same time, if you don't need an application and just want to serve a HN style site, you can render HTML with a bit of CSS and everything works well. To me, that's one hell of a success story.
Are you kidding me? Flash was an absurdly popular platform. Careers were launched on Newgrounds!