I still don’t quite understand why we don’t have a successful IDE / editor based on web technologies that would be anywhere close to Flash in terms of popularity.
Is the problem rooted not just in web technologies but in the fact that we live in a different era and creators don’t really express themselves in this way anymore?
Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS and this stack is fairly unworkable for a good visual editor. Anyone who has built a robust visual editor ends up building one using canvas. (Figma is a great example)
Figma is great but it's not using classical tags to express fonts, tables, layout. Similarly Flash got it's layout and animation right... it just wasn't a web standard. A Canvas based editor/builder/WYSIWYG approach would be fantastic but it required us to move past HTML/CSS in the traditional and compatible model.
Said another way - if you try to use HTML/CSS to build a layout tool, you end up having to re-create browser layout and rendering engine.
Developers could build a design/tool similar to flash using canvas and I've actually prototyped elements of a tag/based design language that gets rid of the traditional HTML layout engine. It's significantly faster (1000x) to render/send over the wire but the moat of HTML/CSS is so large that I'm not sure there's interest in such approaches.
"Most purists insist on coding things in HTML/CSS" you write that like it's something bad.
Compared to flash HTML and CSS as enormous advantages ... it's not resource hungry and is accessible if you do it right. Through you have to know your art to use the advantages.
As a kid first learning about programming flash was amazing. The ability to draw or sequence sprites together into animations and then easily stitch those together into simple games is really powerful.
I'm not saying that we should bring back flash for entire websites as was trendy for a second, but I do think we lost something special that had a low barrier to entry for kids, artists etc to create interactive experiences
Ressource hungryness has changed since flash is no more.
Somewhere around half of the last decade, we starting having Chrome and Firefox taking hundred of megabytes per tabs and totalizing a few gigabytes that put them very close to what flash used to take, maybe cpu usage is still lower though.
It's not just that... It's pixels, em, ex, %, px, cm, mm, in, pt, pc... Not to mention margins, padding, box-model, absolute and relative positioning, flex-box, etc. etc. HTML/CSS is one of the most complex standards. You have to remove a lot before things get trivial.
From my point of view the next thing that fills that role would be unity. Though a big part of unitys strength is not being bound to one platform (web) but instead being cross-platform (web, mobile app, desktop, ...). Iirc it has been used by artists for both "advanced" topics like movies as well as for small games.
I am not sure if Unity will ever fill the gap left by Flash.
Flash IDE was easy to use even for very novice creators (at least at a basic level, not talking about ActionScript). So there was a ton of simple animations, silly games, just weird experiments without any purpose or meaning. Many people were just having fun with it and sharing their creations.
When Flash died, this whole ecosystem somehow disappeared instead of migrating to a clear successor.
I might also be getting the timing of it all wrong. Perhaps when Flash was slowly being deprecated it wasn’t that popular anymore and by that time most creators moved on to different—more fractured?—ecosystems.
Yes for the past few decades we've been dealing with HTML5 and related technologies. And while great for laying out simple websites, it pales in comparison to things like Flash in terms of building interactive games and animations. It's just not made to do that stuff and attempts to make it do stuff like that anyway tend to involve a lot of hackery, and workarounds for it's many limitations. Sometimes somebody manages something really nice with it but it seems to be non trivial to deliver good results consistently with it.
People frequently call out how wonderful "native" applications are compared to web applications are fundamentally talking about these limitations. Most web applications that also have mobile applications deliver a second rate and more mediocre experience on the web. With Canvas, WebGL, WASM, etc. a lot of that can now be addressed. Hence ruffle being able to deliver the experience we had decades ago when people routinely knocked out all sorts of things in Flash that are near impossible to do with HTML 5/JS without a lot of work.
All IOS and Android do is provide programmers a robust component library and a modern development experience around it; which is something web developers simply don't have and never have had. The built in browser components are pretty poor in comparison and the stuff people hack around that isn't a whole lot better typically. That's why people prefer native: richer components that work smoother and better. It's just nicer. And less work.
After two decades, I don't believe HTML5 + JS/CSS is actually fixable. There's a technical gap with "native" applications in terms of what it can be made to do. Luckily, with WASM, we don't have to. Ruffle is a nice example of that. Applications like Figma show that UIs in a browser can be fast, responsive, and slick. I see it as an early example of a new style application that mostly just opts out of the traditional web stack and its limitations.
WASM is only going to get better. Jetbrains actually silently released a WASM compiler for Kotlin recently that currently requires several experimental flags on Chrome to enable all the new features it needs for e.g. garbage collection and a few other things. Once that stuff stabilizes in browsers, there's going to be an influx of languages that don't do manual memory management and those languages will bring new tools and component frameworks. It will become basically a general purpose architecture you can target with pretty much anything that has a compiler. Doing DOM/CSS based work with that is going to be possible of course. But driving a "native" framework that bypasses that, probably makes more sense for a lot of things.
Adobe Animate, formerly known as Flash (the authoring software), supports HTML5. But since it doesn't support ActionScript with HTML5, only JavaScript, it might have lost a lot of its old momentum?
Is the problem rooted not just in web technologies but in the fact that we live in a different era and creators don’t really express themselves in this way anymore?