CNN, ABC and co can hire me, give me the FLA source files, and I will, for a honest pay, translate all that content into standard web techs so it can be seen in any browser.
And even if they don't have the sources, I can decompile the files and work from there.
Flash isn't the problem here, Is management ready to spend money on "modernizing" that content or not? Because it's likely that what these interactive apps were doing in 2001 couldn't be done with webtech at that time.
Technology is the problem is a common view in the public consciousness.
When I took a film exhibition class and we had a class on showing older films, I was surprised to hear that old analog 35mm film was considered the gold standard of archival formats for film preservationists.
The reason why digital formats, formats where the data is not liable to degrade over time, are not considered better is because “the formats keep changing”.
Of course you can encode your media in a lossless format, carefully choose open formats over bespoke proprietary formats, transcode as needed for the latest codecs, and if all else fails, play it in an emulator, which can run the proprietary codec.
Most people in the public, artistic professionals, and the journalists, are at the application level. They want to plug something in and have it just work. If you say you have to put thought into how you do something, it’s equivalent to saying it’s too hard and you basically can’t do it.
Besides, why should they hire you and me to play this media? They basically didn’t have this problem for decades with film/video. Then we, as technologists, come in with new wiz-bang toys that break compatibility every few years. If they’re being uncharitable, they see us as coming in with solutions to problems our industry imposed on them. I can see how technology could even be seen as racketeering. For journalists, technology has been bad for the business model and imposes new costs. Not a great look.
You're right to some extent but it's worth noting that Flash wasn't killed on a whim. It was the no. 1 vector for catching malware by browsing internet -- for over a decade, and at some point it became clear that trying to keep it patched is hopeless long-term because zero-day bugs kept coming. It was like nicely looking box that emits radioactive waste.
I mean, that's just a side effect of being popular. In the 2000s, Windows was the no. 1 vector, which Apple kept riding the coattails of with their "no viruses" slogan until macOS became popular enough to be targetable and they had to eat crow.
Right now, if you give me a random device, chances are the way I'll jailbreak it is through the random fork of WebKit installed on it.
Everything with mass distribution eventually becomes the vector.
> The reason why digital formats, formats where the data is not liable to degrade over time, are not considered better is because “the formats keep changing”.
Content from 2001 would have been in Flash v5 at the latest - more likely v4, and AFAIK are both pretty fully supported by modern emulators.
As such, it sounds like the "lost" content the article discusses is lost in the sense that nobody is preserving it, not in the sense that something is preventing it from being preserved.
The way CNN has framed this annoys me. I can't help but read an implicit "Don't blame us!" at the end of the headline. The article goes on to talk about how some other news organizations are rebuilding the content in newer technology, or using an emulator to deliver it to modern platforms, and how CNN has no plans to do any of that. I am not sure that the blame lies with Adobe.
If you publish software, then one day, eventually, the platform that your software originally ran on will either disappear or change enough that your software will no longer run. (The mainframe people are laughing at me now, but that's an extreme outlier.) Maybe the news organizations didn't realize it at the time, but once they started putting out interactive features, they become software publishers.
I think maybe there's a disconnect here because news organizations have thus far been able to rely on librarians and archivists paid by other people doing all the work of preserving their content for them. Since they inadvertently became software publishers, there's an element of surprise to this: "what do you mean, the stuff we put out 20 years ago isn't viewable anymore?" Most of the media they work in don't have these kinds of problems -- text is highly portable; audio and video can be digitized and converted to newer formats. That binary blob in a proprietary format? Not so much.
> If you publish software, then one day, eventually, the platform that your software originally ran on will either disappear or change enough that your software will no longer run.
You make it sound like this is inevitable. It's the byproduct of a bunch of other decisions, only some of which are intentional. As you say, mainframes. If we wanted to secure longevity, we could. Unfortunately, this churn is very profitable for a lot of the people who, given a free market, decide whether we will do that or not.
Over a long enough timescale, it basically is inevitable, because no assumption is safe in unbounded time. There is that “technically” bit where you could just emulate the legacy, but as seen with Flash it’s easier said than done. (We could do better if we disregard copyright, but it wouldn’t be easy.)
this is such a weird article - could the same article be written to say that because VCRs are no longer common household items, decades worth of media recordings are lost to history?
From the article:
> That means what was once an interactive explainer of how the planes hit the World Trade Center or a visually-rich story on where some survivors of the attacks are now, at best, a non-functioning still image, or at worst, a gray box informing readers that "Adobe Flash player is no longer supported."
Does CNN really think the best, most interactive way to learn about 9/11 history, for the average person, is to load up the internet archive, and play with some crappy SWF?
Of course, I guess the original SWF experience is an interesting historical document, and I wouldn't be surprised if museums one day have an interactive exhibit where you can use a 2001-era Gateway PC to navigate those "lost" sites, just like they were back then.
But even then, the news coverage is not "lost" to history. If I found a copy of the original Hindenburg newsreel film, I wouldn't call it "lost" just because I don't have the equipment to play it.
Equipment to play video reels would be pretty easy to reconstruct when given a single reel. Even a VHS would be much harder, and reverse engineering the JPEG specifications would be nigh impossible.
That is assuming you have to reverse engineer it. While it is true that some proprietary formats will inevitably be lost to time, a lot of open formats could be reconstructed in the future simply by preserving the format specification. Think ogg or mkv for example.
If you had to guess, what will be the next content format to become inaccessible due to a changing software landscape? Is there anything we can do now to work to preserve the content in that format?
This has already happened many times. One of the early examples is Habitat from 1986. There’s a video about trying to save it here https://youtu.be/kRAUO3v-Xkc?t=812
I'd answer the opposite question: what could increase the chances of a document to last?
- The document should be archived to a place where people actively manage the archives. Servers and domain names may vanish, long term backups are incredibly hard, we need something robust managed by dedicated experts.
- use pure text, encoded in ascii UTF-something. These encodings are widespread and unlikely to vanish, or many things would be inaccessible anyway.
- use simple HTML, with medias (images, videos, sounds) embedded in a standard way using img, audio, video, possibly object tags. HTML is widespread, and it's still relatively easy to build a web engine that will render this into an exploitable result. At worst, one can skim through an HTML code or search for keywords in it, even if it's not perfect.
- using the XHTML syntax might help: it's way easier to re-build an XML parser than a complete HTML5 parser with all the weird rules
- The document should render legibly with JavaScript disabled so we don't require our lineage to maintain a JavaScript engine or run some sort of emulator with outdated software.
- The document should render legibly with CSS disabled. At worst, building a simple HTML engine will probably still be easy to do.
- The document should render legibly without any custom font that might not be exploitable in the future
- If you can't help requiring CSS, use simple CSS directives. This may increase the chances for our lineage to be able to rebuild a simple web engine with just the necessary stuff to render the old documents;
- if you can't help using Javascript, all the important resources should at least load at page load (except for images / videos / medias if they are lazily loaded using the lazy HTML attribute or something of the sort). It will probably ease archival a lot. It should not be necessary to run your code to figure out how to retrieve all the document's dependencies.
- anything animated by custom code is more likely to be inaccessible in the future. Sometimes it's necessary, but the document without those parts may still be valuable for future historians. It may help describing those parts in the text of the document so at least historians will be able to know that something is missing and what.
- don't use anything relying on a closed specification. Ideally use widespread standards only. Open but not widespread standard will probably not be re-implemented by historians.
- if HTML or something similar like DocBook is not used, an easy to re-implement subset of PDF is probably ok. Many things are only available in PDF so historians will probably have to find a way to manage PDFs. PS might be ok too.
- text in Unicode is probably way better than text embedded in images or drawn as shapes in vector formats. In the future, people might not use the same alphabets as the ones we are using today, recognizing our letters and signs will be probably hard for them. At least Unicode would provide them a way to render our letters in a standard, unique, easy to manage way.
CDNs are another aspect to consider: they can vanish, losing dependencies of your document. The document should be archived before this happens.
The problem with complex Javascript code: as long as web engines are well maintained, we are probably good. We can hope that backward compatibility will be kelp, but the more the document uses complex / advanced features, the more it is likely to use an API that will be deprecated and then removed. It has already happened. Try using -moz-border-radius today for instance.
But even with web maintained engines, complex code will probably make it harder to handle the document for archival and consulting (one thing an historian may want to do is search for keywords in an archive. But if the content appears only when some complex code is executed, it may be difficult to manage).
We also cannot assume that web engines as we know them today are going to be maintained forever. A revolution might happen. Applications could move from the web to another runtime, making the maintenance of a browser engine expensive and overkill. A new format adapted to documents could appear. Or a new way of producing, transmitting and viewing content.
Unfortunately, it's very hard and costly to implement a Javascript engine with all the features provided by the web engine + a full web engine with all the whole CSS feature set from scratch. We'd better make the life of our future historian easier by not over using the features we have today to write documents.
VMs suppose you still have the OS images and applications at hand, and make it more difficult to mass-handle all this information in a convenient / workable way. They require powerful machines, and, indeed, advanced emulators.
But I'd argue that this is realistic for most publisher. See for example bbc.co.uk or theguardian.com. Their articles render well even in a terminal-based browser without CSS like w3m. For me this shows that this is realistic. What special need would require a publisher to break this?
You may still use complex CSS/HTML/JavaScript, only the page should render well without the complexity. Graceful degradation / progressive enhancement are okay.
I actually browse the Web with JS disabled by default and many things work actually well. Problematic pages are documents that are written like applications with a frontend framework, leading to blank pages. Or pages that have a strange behavior like an endless redirection/refresh when Javascript is disabled. Yes, I've seen that. Those pages are probably difficult to archive and will probably be harder to handle in the future.
And that kids is the reason you should avoid closed formats.
Ok, adobe eventually document the format but it was too late and never gave and open source implementation for parser or viewer. So, this point is mostly moot.
This is what makes me sad about the current state of things. The web took a huge step backwards abandoning flash, and we're still fumbling to replicate the good parts of it.
> but what happens when that draft is written on a software program that becomes obsolete?
I hate this language, it's so incredibly deceiving. Flash was a 'proprietary standard' fully controlled by a profit-seeking entity; meaning support for it can be arbitrarily revoked at any time (which of course it was).
I mean, can we really even call it a 'standard' if it's specs are black box and anti-interoperability?
These big firms are just messing us around and playing tricks on us using language - there is no such thing as a 'proprietary standard'. Parasites, please will you consider using another name like 'proprietary straightjacket'? 'Proprietary standards' are anti-commons.
Thanks for watering down the free software movement with your business -friendly 'open source movement' trickery, O'Reilly [1].
I don't know why we'd want that news coverage. It was just nonstop repeats of the same damned info. I think MTV would have done better at not turning my brain to mush than the news.
I don't know about you guys, but I still maintain a computer from 2010-era that has browsers that fully support flash (and shockwave, and java, and etc). Any time it pops up I just view it on that machine in my shared monitor span.
Adobe's lack of interest in making the Flash runtime a quality bit of software killed Flash. At the executive level Adobe was only interested in selling authoring/server software and only supported the Flash runtime as much as necessary to sell that software.
Microsoft and Apple hated it because the plug-in was a top vector for malware on their OSes. Browser vendors, so Microsoft and Apple plus Google and Mozilla, hated it because it was a top vector for malware in their browsers and forced their hand with respect to plug-in APIs. Apple triply hated Flash because it's performance on the Mac was terrible compared to Windows. That was the status quo before the iPhone was released.
Flash Lite on early smartphones was barely Flash. It was more an ActionScript 3 runtime with a limited version of Flash's drawing engine. It couldn't play arbitrary SWFs on the web.
The Flash plug-in Adobe eventually released for Android was also pretty awful. It had terrible performance and was a battery killer. SWFs designed for WIMP desktops also worked for shit on touchscreen Androids. The plug-in was terrible at translating touch events to click and drag events. It demonstrated pretty clearly every argument Apple made about keeping it off the iPhone.
Adobe was not a capable steward of the Flash plug-in/runtime. What little effort they devoted to the plug-in was focused almost entirely on the Wintel platform with all others being effectively ignored.
Adobe killed Flash by a thousand tiny cuts from mismanagement and lack of interest. Their business model for the past two decades has been rent seeking on products they bought with Photoshop money and then stuck in maintenance mode. They were only interested in Flash insofar as it would allow for more rent seeking.
And even if they don't have the sources, I can decompile the files and work from there.
Flash isn't the problem here, Is management ready to spend money on "modernizing" that content or not? Because it's likely that what these interactive apps were doing in 2001 couldn't be done with webtech at that time.