
How Adobe Flash fell, and why Flash content is worth preserving - imanewsman
http://qz.com/863467/how-adobe-flash-once-the-face-of-the-web-fell-to-the-brink-of-obscurity-and-why-its-worth-saving/
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cableshaft
As someone who made a lot of games in Flash that would be difficult to port to
HTML5, and a fan of a lot of old Flash content whose creators have pretty much
disappeared nowadays, I would like to see more of an effort to preserve and
archive these things.

There was a ton of cool creative content that came about thanks to Flash (and
Newgrounds in particular). It'd be a shame to lose it all just because people
now hate the technology they were built on.

~~~
clouddrover
I suppose the simplest thing to do would be for Adobe to produce a WebAssembly
build of Flash player. Any old Flash content could be run via that without the
need to install Flash on the system.

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kefka
Wow. that chart is misleading. They consider "No Digital Rights Information"
to be a high risk factor. Bias much?

And it's not even correct, with plugins with PDFs. They can have DRM junk
encrusted on them.

~~~
dispose13432
HTML is supported by only one vendor?

Which one? Firefox or Chromium-WebKit or Explorer?

~~~
mishac
WHATWG maybe?

Also HTML is apparently more complex than JPEG and MP3. I'll remember that
next time I"m hand-coding some audio files and using a machine to generate
HTML.

~~~
lpr22
This chart is so nonesense. HTML is deprecated? Really? And how is having more
versions a higher risk of obsolescence, but having /multiple specifications/
reduces risk?

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niftich
Steve Jobs killed Flash by banishing it from iOS, and then WHATWG, the Chrome
team [1], and Mozilla [2][3] started rushing to cram [4] all sorts of JS APIs
into the web platform instead. Still, it took almost 5 years to catch HTML5 up
to the capabilities provided by Flash [5] -- and that's if all vendors agree
on which APIs to support [6]. Mobile Safari right now lags behind, which is
not to the detriment of Apple: every developer wanting presence on iOS will
adopt Apple's preferred workflow, and to date they have had no strong
incentive to promote web-based apps, unlike their rivals Google and Mozilla.

Adobe tried to play it cool by pivoting to AIR, a Flash-to-Native generator,
which luckily they already had. Meanwhile they put out a press release trying
to position their upcoming tools as the preferred toolset for HTML5
production, but this mostly hasn't panned out.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161)
[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12135175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12135175)
[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259435#12259940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259435#12259940)
[6]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12760949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12760949)

~~~
nashashmi
I liked flash a lot. But the problem with Adobe/Macromedia was they never gave
it too much development time. It took a long time for flash to start using the
GPU. It took a while for flash to start its way towards mobile, before
abandoning mobile.

Flash could have been a platform that apps could have been built on and
displayed in an app store, but they never promoted anything close to it. Flash
could have been a complete browser, but they never cared. Flash could have
been a cloud desktop (like Goowy Desktop [bought and shut by AOL]). Flash
could have been an OS (like Chrome OS or Android OS). Flash was already a
pretty good PDF reader and worked faster than Adobe PDF in the browser, but no
one knew.

Flash had so much potential, but Macromedia did not have much money to invest
and Adobe bought it without any imagination.

All efforts in Flash went to waste and set the industry 5-10 years behind ...
so far behind that we now have to wait for HTML5 to be better ... slowly.

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dispose13432
He forgot to mention that since it's closed source and Adobe isn't releasing a
SFW converter, even the Internet Archive can't backup a copy of the sfw file
and have it useful.

OpenOffice, OOTH, can be converted to HTML or PDF, and even if OO and LO go
down, the engine will still be available.

~~~
niftich
The 'OpenOffice' format in the chart (SXW) is dates from OpenOffice 1.x [1],
and was a transitional format between the old binary and the not-yet-developed
ODF the same way that Microsoft Office 2003 shipped with an intermediate XML
format that is similar but isn't compatible with what later became OOXML.

For all serious uses, ODF has long-ago replaced the SXW format.

[1]
[https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Gui...](https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Getting_Started/File_formats)

~~~
dispose13432
True, but there (I hope, at least) is an old OpenOffice (at least in VS) where
you can find a parser.

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diogenescynic
My internet browsing has been much more enjoyable as Flash has become less
prevalent. I'm glad it's going away. I only wish it happened sooner.

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Upas
I thought this was a decent read, but I'd like the point out that the author
really isn't making the case to save Flash as a technology. Rather, he's
saying we should save all the content generated with Flash.

The headline is a little misleading.

~~~
dang
Ok, we put Flash content in the title above.

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feld
View the archived flash content in an ancient browser in a VM. We can't
promise to be backwards compatible forever or we'll never move forward.

