Considering that flash brought us newgrounda and inspired/generated an entire generation of animators and web designers, i’d comfortably say you are objectively wrong about that.
I think there’s an argument that flash did well for the internet back in the day, but alao there’s an argument that it doesn’t need to belong in the current age of the internet.
Well, yeah. Flash filled a hole of missing technology in the HTML standard. How it did the job is arguable. Now we have stuff like HTML 5 and CSS, which is better than flash in every aspect.
Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.
In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.
In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.
Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.
Considering that flash brought us newgrounda and inspired/generated an entire generation of animators and web designers, i’d comfortably say you are objectively wrong about that.
I think there’s an argument that flash did well for the internet back in the day, but alao there’s an argument that it doesn’t need to belong in the current age of the internet.
Well, yeah. Flash filled a hole of missing technology in the HTML standard. How it did the job is arguable. Now we have stuff like HTML 5 and CSS, which is better than flash in every aspect.
Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.
In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.
In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.
Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.