[HN Gopher] A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
___________________________________________________________________
A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
Author : known
Score : 248 points
Date : 2021-02-05 05:55 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| but if it's written in Rust are they going to be able to emulate
| the security holes so you get the full experience?
| pjmlp wrote:
| If they target WebAssembly most likely,
|
| "USENIX Security '20 - Everything Old is New Again: Binary
| Security of WebAssembly"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glL__xjviro
| nynx wrote:
| lmao, only if you write something other than rust
| fulafel wrote:
| There's a lot of unsafe usage in this codebase
| (https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/search?q=unsafe
| returns 5 screenfuls) - though I don't know enough about
| Rust to tell how risky these are.
| emi2k01 wrote:
| Around 3.5 of those pages are unsafe uses for
| implementing the same trait for garbage collection. The
| implementations seem very simple and the documentation
| mentions invariants that are easy to hold so it should be
| easy to recognize an unsound implementation. I think that
| it should be possible to not use unsafe at all for some
| of those but I only skimmed over the code so I'm not
| sure.
|
| Most of the rest of unsafe uses are to skip rust checks
| that have already been asserted and for FFI which is
| unavoidable.
|
| There are only a few unsafe uses whose invariants are not
| well defined. I only gave it a quick look but I doubt
| they're risky.
|
| Even if an attacker manages to exploit ruffle, I wonder
| what could they do in a WASM sandbox in an isolated
| domain.
| kibwen wrote:
| In this context any usage of `unsafe` in Rust is probably
| irrelevant to the safety of the resulting program,
| because AFAIK the WASM sandbox doesn't trust programs
| enough to actually allow them to do anything that could
| potentially violate memory safety.
| fulafel wrote:
| Yep, in a lot of use cases the wasm version probably is
| fine with the browser sandbox. But according to the
| readme this also targets the desktop. I would imagine the
| desktop mode is native code + wgpu, as there seems to be
| a wgpu directory under renderer/ .
|
| There are some scenarios when vulnerabilities in a wasm
| compiled program can be harmful too though. For example
| the web page embedding the emulated flash applet doesn't
| necessarily intend to give that app full access to that
| origin's context. For example it could exfiltrate some
| api keys or other security tokens of the logged in user
| of the containing page.
| josefx wrote:
| Just run it on an Intel processor with some modern RAM.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| I wonder if something like Ruffle could one day be used to
| automatically and losslessly convert Flash files into other
| formats?
| dleslie wrote:
| I'm excited for this; flash is still wholly unmatched as an
| artistic expression tool. HTML5 and WebAssembly can, obviously,
| provide the technical chops; but we've never recovered the
| experience of a novice Flash user who, with no prior domain
| experience, could realize an inspired prototype game or
| entertaining animation in less than an hour.
|
| The tool was just that accessible, and the community that good.
| have_faith wrote:
| Having to account for responsiveness kills a lot of creativity
| regardless of the tools used. Amateurs also used to hand craft
| unique and interesting Geocities websites but responsiveness
| has really hampered how easy and accessible that is.
| imbnwa wrote:
| I would add that Canvas' performance profile is not the same
| as the Flash runtime either, you can't just layer on top of
| layer with Canvas and not give a F like Animate/Flash let you
| do. Artists/amateurs don't want to have to think about
| performance tuning across browsers.
| [deleted]
| salamanderman wrote:
| I haven't used Unity, but I'm often surprised that it hasn't
| taken this niche.
| MattRix wrote:
| This really isn't what Unity does. Unity is mostly just the
| engine and level editor. The thing that made Flash special
| was that it was a complete vector animation authoring tool
| first, before you get to all the scripting etc.
| LASR wrote:
| Ironic that "accessibility" was one of the downsides to flash
| as opposed to html5.
|
| But I agree with you.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Agree! It's not just unmatched on the web, for many purposes
| it's unmatched across the board.
|
| I remember reading that the English cartoon Duggee (which also
| happens to be my favourite children's show _by far_ ) is 100%
| animated in Flash. Get this, it's a professional, prime time,
| internationally syndicated TV show and they use Flash because
| it let's the animators be more productive than anything else.
| m_t wrote:
| There has been so many cartoons made in flash, with great
| artistic result.
|
| Well, turns out there's a wikipedia page on that: https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... Even
| Family Guy started with Flash!
| fooker wrote:
| > The tool was just that accessible, and the community that
| good.
|
| The tool is exactly the same and it outputs html\js now.
| dleslie wrote:
| Not quite. Animate exists, but acquiring it is prohibitively
| expensive. Flash was popular in no small part because it was
| easily pirated, and so cheap as free. Animate requires a
| prohibitively expensive yearly subscription fee.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Whats missing from modern tools?
| echelon wrote:
| Flash was really special.
|
| The design philosophy behind flash was to let you make
| animations and interactive content.
|
| The design philosophy behind html/css/js/web stack is a
| composable system of modules that can be bundled, used to
| center objects, and plumb state to components.
|
| Flash was on another level. The web hasn't been the same
| since it left us.
| emayljames wrote:
| Using Adobe Animate (previously called Adobe Flash
| {something?}) you can create all the same content you could
| previously exporting to html5/JS/CSS.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| Which modern tools you have in mind?
| danShumway wrote:
| It's a combination of a lot of things. In theory, Adobe
| Animate still exists today, but it's wildly inaccessible both
| because of cost and its proprietary nature. There's also
| complications based on how PWA get deployed to mobile, etc...
|
| But ignoring all of that, here's a quick list of (some)
| categories of things I still miss from Flash:
|
| - nested animations/clips: The recursive nature of Flash made
| making animations very fast. It also opened up some workflows
| with AS2 that were not particularly scalable, but that were
| _excellent_ for fast prototyping. This is the biggest thing I
| miss when I open programs like Aseprite. I can 't begin to
| describe how great it was for programming to be able to embed
| code inside of animation, and have the entire thing be a clip
| that could be embedded inside another program. Doing stuff
| like point-and-click games with that workflow was so fast and
| easy, and it was so easy to build up animations with a lot of
| disparate parts.
|
| - a content-first workflow: related to the above, Flash let
| you switch between coding and content very quickly without
| worrying about stuff like imports. The fact that the
| content/animation and coding were so synchronized was a
| different way of thinking about architecture. There were
| problems associated with it when it came to scalability and
| organization, but again, just very fast to work with, very
| accessible, and lent itself to a certain way of thinking
| about prototypes that had some big advantages. When you had
| an idea you could be switching back and forth from code to
| animation constantly, you didn't have to alt-tab or export
| anything.
|
| - AS2: maybe controversial, because AS3 was pretty popular
| and a lot of programmers were campaigning hard that it was
| the "correct" way to do things, but again, I want to stress
| the weird combination of content/animation/code was part of
| what made Flash special, and abstracting some of that out and
| having more "professional" content pipelines and different
| ways of doing events and organizing everything -- I think
| something was lost with that transition.
|
| - Also just, in general, the animation tools were good. I
| don't know of an Open Source (or shared source) tool that has
| the same level of animation tools. Blender is doing some
| really compelling stuff that I'm very excited about, but
| Greasepencil is not a substitute for Flash, it's going in its
| own direction, and it's much less accessible. Aseprite is
| great (being able to tag frames and export data about them is
| handy), but it has some quirks and annoyances around the
| timeline controls. It's also just a lot more limited, you're
| basically forced to do frame-by-frame animation. There are
| some programs that I see animators online using that seem to
| be very powerful, but they're often either quite expensive or
| so restrictive and narrowly targeted that I'm not even
| willing to think about using them.
|
| - And again, I can't stress enough: even just as an animation
| tool, even forgetting about games, adding scripting to
| animations is useful. You can have a movie clip that repeats
| until you hit a frame and throw an event. You can have a
| hand-animated scene with a procedurally animated background.
| And that's all really, really fast to do because the way the
| UX is set up you just have everything accessible at the same
| time.
|
| ----
|
| I don't think it would be impossible to replicate some of the
| things that made Flash great, and if someone really took the
| time to sit down and think about what made that workflow what
| it was, I don't think it would be impossible to make a Flash
| replacement considerably _better_ than Flash. Flash had bad
| audio tools, its data formats were all closed down, it wasn
| 't really extensible, it's drawing tools could have been
| better, and for most of its life it was terrible if you
| wanted to do anything with non-vector content. There are big
| improvements that an Open replacement could make.
|
| It would be an uphill battle, because the ecosystem
| surrounding Flash didn't just exist because of Flash. There
| are a bunch of different factors that went into it. And there
| are some APIs on the web that are still annoying. Mobile
| support for web games is still annoying. Controller support
| is not great, rumble isn't really supported. There's stuff we
| could do better. But the core functionality that old-school
| Flash needed is mostly there, and we could have
| (functionally) a Flash replacement today. It also wouldn't
| need to be a web app, you could have a Flash replacement that
| targeted the web for compilation that _itself_ ran as a
| native app, and that would be completely fine.
|
| Heck, you could have one that didn't target the web.
| Obviously I'm thinking first about the web, but if there was
| a Flash-equivalent Open Source prototyping tool that targeted
| Linux/Windows, that would also be great, and as far as I know
| that kind of tool also doesn't exist today.
|
| It could be done, it would just be a lot of work to build,
| and tricky to get right and to get polished. The really weird
| reality is that as far as I can tell, no one's ever _tried_
| to build a Flash successor that actually imitated the
| features I care about in Flash. There are plenty of game dev
| platforms, some very easy to use, but very few of them have
| great content creation tools baked in, very few are
| experimenting with completely novel approaches to
| architecture like Flash 's movie clip system.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dleslie wrote:
| > This is the biggest thing I miss when I open programs
| like Aseprite. I can't begin to describe how great it was
| for programming to be able to embed code inside of
| animation, and have the entire thing be a clip that could
| be embedded inside another program.
|
| This was just _magic_.
|
| Godot and Unity prefabs are sort of half-way there, but the
| scene view being the primary interaction for editing causes
| the _magic_ to disappear. Flash had the timeline as the
| primary view; so where in scene view you drop an object
| into a space, in Flash you drop an animation into a
| timeline.
|
| The outcome is very different. With time moving forward in
| the scene view, IE in Unity play mode, the objects in the
| world move and behave in a linear fashion. A ball rolls
| forward until it finds the lowest point to settle in. With
| time moving forward in the timeline the animations within
| loop endlessly. Time goes from 0 to N and back to 0 to
| repeat.
|
| This was absolute _magic_ for rapid iteration.
|
| And yes, all the rest you discussed was goodly, as well.
|
| And it was an absolutely great cartoon animation toolkit.,
| brundolf wrote:
| PICO-8 seems adjacent, at least. It's generally more
| programming-oriented, but it includes tools for editing
| sprites and music and code and bundles everything together
| under a single editor/runtime, which can target desktop or
| web or even be distributed in the form of an image file.
| danShumway wrote:
| PICO-8 is fantastic, but ultimately way less flexible and
| powerful than Flash.
|
| That's not a dig at PICO-8, it's limited on purpose. But
| the strength of Flash was that it was extremely flexible
| and exposed an architectural style that lent itself very
| well to prototyping. PICO-8 does have all of its tools
| built into the same app, but it doesn't have anything at
| all like a movie clip system, it doesn't even have events
| or a timeline. I think it just has very different goals,
| it's a philosophy built around having a small, self-
| contained, understandable system -- not around having a
| unique workflow.
|
| The closest programming/architecture analogy I draw to
| PICO-8 isn't Flash, it's the TI-83 graphing calculator.
| That platform also had a lot of influence over how I
| learned to program, and it had similar strengths to
| PICO-8 in how limited it was and how that forced you to
| get creative and allowed you to really deeply understand
| what was going on in your program.
|
| Where I _do_ see PICO-8 getting adjacent to Flash is in
| the community. I think when some people say they miss
| Flash, what they really miss is sites like Newgrounds and
| the surrounding indie scene. PICO-8 does capture some of
| that, it 's a great environment to learn to code in, and
| it's a fun environment to work in. I just don't think it
| captures any of the tooling. When I say I miss Flash, I
| kind of miss the indie scene, but I miss the tooling
| more.
| brundolf wrote:
| That makes sense
|
| I'm honestly tempted to take a swing at the "open
| replacement" that you described in your original
| post..... Though I never actually used Flash back in the
| day, so I'd need to do some research
| danShumway wrote:
| It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Not
| necessary to try and make something myself, but just...
| what would a modern Flash look like if it wasn't just a
| clone, but it was people actually thinking about what
| made Flash attractive and really trying to figure out how
| to replicate its strengths and address its weaknesses?
|
| An interesting point here is that Adobe Animate still
| exists, which (in theory, I haven't used it) still has a
| lot of these features. But nobody uses it for game
| prototyping that I'm aware of -- and not just because
| it's expensive or (in my case) because people refuse to
| use subscription software. I've seen gamedevs do their
| animation in Animate CC, and then export it out to Unity.
| So there's something going on there.
|
| I wonder if I went back and reinstalled Flash 8, if there
| are parts of it I would notice that didn't age well, or
| paradigms that needed to be rethought. But I still feel
| like that _kind_ of workflow is something we could have
| again, and with enough thought put into it, it could be
| even better. I would welcome more people thinking about
| this kind of stuff or trying their hand at prototyping
| game engines that were designed around novel workflows.
|
| There's fertile ground in this area if someone wanted to
| explore it and dig into it.
| syspec wrote:
| Are you the author of another flash shim named shumway?
|
| What is the status of that project, is it still active?
| What do you think of this project?
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Sh...
| danShumway wrote:
| Hah! You're not the first person to refer me to that.
|
| It's entirely coincidental, but I love that I share the
| same name. For purely selfish ego reasons I wish it had
| succeeded.
| danbolt wrote:
| I don't think anything feature-wise is missing on the runtime
| side, but Flash's keyframe/editor setup just let people make
| the most amazing things.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Stickdeath comes to mind. 2advanced studios work. All the
| amazing bitmap effects. Flash was really easy to create
| interactive scenes as your site. Each one different from
| another. Each one a masterpiece of art and layers and
| effects taken from gaming and VFX/Film. I miss that. Don't
| get me wrong, I'm glad flash it dead, but I really miss the
| beautiful sites it enabled.
| coldtea wrote:
| Isn't Adobe Animate the same thing, keyframes and
| everything, just with html output?
| patates wrote:
| It also supports Javascript now, and they seemed to have
| deprecated AS1 & 2 support. I've even seen some TS
| definitions on the internet.
| Arainach wrote:
| Animate is only available as part of a $236/yr
| subscription and can't be purchased. Flash was far more
| attainable.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, mostly piracy. So it doesn't matter.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| It's probably harder to pirate now.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Great project!
|
| To be honest I'm slightly annoyed whenever a github submission
| mentions the programming language for no specific reason.
|
| Rust is a great tool but it doesn't matter unless you want to
| participate in this project.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Of course it matters even if YOU don't want to participate. The
| techy types that frequent here may actually want to contribute,
| or be interested in how the code was implemented as a learning
| resource.
|
| Additionally, there are biased for and against programming
| languages, and I guarantee that there is a whole set of people
| on HN that would be interested in this project because it is a
| language they like. Rust means you can run this software almost
| anywhere and it's going to be easy to install.
| Vespasian wrote:
| I guess that's true and I shouldn't comment that "early" in
| the morning ;)
| anthk wrote:
| This is not an emulator.
| daypay wrote:
| Can't wait to play Runescape in the browser again.
| McDev wrote:
| That runs on Java unfortunately
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| There are actually a good number of ways to get Java to
| compile and run in a browser. It should be OK, perhaps the 3D
| or other advanced API's may be a mess however.
| 101008 wrote:
| I helped restoring JK Rowling official website [1] from 004 to
| 2010, which was entirely in Flash. It was a reproduction of her
| desktop / house, with a lot of fun sections, secrets, easter,
| eggs. After years rebuilding it (with swf files, decompiling them
| to understand the Ajax calls, etc), browsers announced they were
| going to stop supporting Flash, so all the hard work was almost
| useless (a few people saw it and loved it, though).
|
| I tried Ruffle but unfortunately it still doesn't support all the
| original Flash features, so most of the website is unusable yet.
| But I wait for the way when they complete it and the website can
| be browseable again.
|
| [1]: https://www.therowlinglibrary.com/jkrowling.com/en
| wentwrong wrote:
| I just thought that it would be nice to have a site like "You
| Might Not Need Jquery" (http://youmightnotneedjquery.com), but
| one that helps to find alternatives to Flash features.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orisinal
|
| Can we revive Orisinal? I used to spend hours on their games:
| https://wsa-global.org/winner/orisinal/
| adrian17 wrote:
| With the Ruffle browser extension, it appears that most of the
| games already work (at least the random sample I checked).
| ink_13 wrote:
| I first heard about this project when it saved homestarrunner.com
| from the dead.
|
| I'm glad it exists, there's a lot of 2000's-era web history
| wrapped up in Flash.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Homestarrunner was mostly not interactive so they could have
| just converted everything to video (I bet it is on YouTube
| already).
| ygra wrote:
| It is on YouTube. But there's a _lot_ of Easter eggs in the
| Strong Bad Emails that rely on interactivity which are lost
| in the video.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I read the title three times to decide it was saying it's
| emulating a Flash Player. Seems I was wrong, it is a Flash
| player, or you could say it's a Flash interpreter.
|
| It doesn't take a specific Flash Player and run it in emulation.
| That seemed viable to me, the OS support needed wouldn't require
| any specific knowledge of Flash/ActionScript which is
| horizontally portable from/to non-flash things.
| villgax wrote:
| Please FFS let flash die a peaceful death
| [deleted]
| imhoguy wrote:
| Please not. Such projects are essential for historical
| preservation. Shall we let C64, Atari die too and stop
| improving emulators?
| Shared404 wrote:
| Yeah, Flash-the-platform can die for all I care.
|
| Flash-the-content needs to be preserved, and Ruffle seems
| like a promising step towards that.
| pvg wrote:
| Previously:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242115
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20728019
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Ruffle is in the proof-of-concept stage and can currently run
| early Flash animations and games.
|
| Yeah. Just like the 10,000 other Flash implementations. The
| problem is that SWF is very complex format and relies on
| proprietary codecs. Also, there are multiple runtimes to support.
| Like all attempts before it, simple cases will be covered but
| anything slightly more complicated will never work.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Given the folks sponsoring the project, I have higher hopes for
| this than you do.
| macspoofing wrote:
| I've seen this before, going all the way back to Gnu Gnash
| all the way up to Shumway (which was functional in the same
| way all the others were). The simple parts, typically the
| things from the AS1/AS2 world, are simple. As you get into
| the AS3 world there's a drop-off. I don't see anything in
| this project that hasn't been done before.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am not aware of the folks behind Gnash, and Mozilla
| obviously cares about the web, but I don't think either of
| those organizations have the dedication to Flash that
| Newgrounds, or even the NYT, have.
|
| Time will tell I guess.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Indeed. I was tracking a lot of these projects a few
| years ago because we had a Flex/AS3 RIA (remember that
| term?) so I was _hoping_ we 'd get a freebie port to
| HTML/JS.
|
| In the end, we ended up writing our own AS3->JavaScript
| transpiler[1]. The Apache Flex project has since done
| something similar, though by the time that was done, we
| were done. So my skepticism stemmed from just seeing
| these projects come out, get some quick wins from
| implementing a simple subset of swf, and then just go
| nowhere.
|
| But I wish them well. I hope it works out.
|
| [1]Well, not totally ours. We used the existing Falcon
| compiler front-end and we wrote the emitter to transpile
| to TypeScript (after implementing a subset of Flash SDK
| that we needed).
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Oh wow, RIA, yeah, takes me back :)
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Just tried it out on all my flash animations and games I made in
| 2005-6. Haven't busted those out for a while. What a throwback.
| Handled them all pretty well except for one game that loaded
| images of my friends. Must've had the image files not embedded or
| something. Great work, and thanks!
| jgalt212 wrote:
| If this can play Elf Bowling, I'm in.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| What do you mean, a Flash player _emulator_? There 's no real CPU
| to emulate in the first place. Shouldn't we call that a _Flash
| player_?
|
| Or is this because of trademark or something?
| lxgr wrote:
| To get to 100% fidelity, there'll be a Windows XP + IE 6 on x86
| emulator in there sooner rather than later.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| You're right it is a unofficial "flash player". I guess the
| original player was some sort of VM since it ran some byte
| code.
| dikei wrote:
| I hope this fare better than GNU Gnash.
|
| Back in university, my friends and I had a team hacking on Gnash
| to try implementing an OpenGLES renderer for a class project. We
| never got it finished, due to the lack of documentation and our
| poor reading of C code.
| lxe wrote:
| Quite a few things on Newgrounds are actually running on Ruffle!
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| I was confused why some old flash games, that I couldn't play
| since I ditched flash, suddenly ran again when I looked them up
| randomly again. I think I just found my answer.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I went looking for the original xiaoxiao stick figure fighting
| swf to load into the demo and found out that Albino Blacksheep is
| already using Ruffle in production:
| https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/fight1
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Ok, funny story about ruffle: Years ago in 2012 some co-workers
| stumbled on the greatest website ever:
| http://www.novalight.net/NOVALIGHT.html (takes a while to load
| now) To prove that HTML5/CSS3 was finally ready, I started a side
| project to recreate it in JS:
| https://github.com/jtwaleson/NovaLight-Challenge . I never got
| far and I don't know if that means I never finish side projects
| or if Flash is officially superior to HTML5. Anyway, the owner of
| the original site found it and emailed me his appreciation and I
| think we both had a good laugh about the situation.
|
| Two weeks ago he emailed me again to ask if I could maybe finish
| the project because flash is now dead, and the site is part of
| his legacy etc. Instead I slapped ruffle.js on it and everything
| is back up! It's quite slow to load, but apart from that
| everything looks great! Ruffle is an amazing project :)
| newswasboring wrote:
| This work should be put in the wikipedia list of outsider
| art[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_outsider_artists
| arghwhat wrote:
| Oh god it's every PowerPoint secreting manager's dream and the
| worst nightmare of everybody else.
| kthxb wrote:
| Awesome page, and it even works flawless on mobile.
| mstade wrote:
| Took a while to load, but absolutely worth the wait!
| smcl wrote:
| I googled Peter K Joneleit after your description of him in the
| README and I was curious if you were just having a bit of fun
| or if he was involved in defining these web standards. Hooooo
| boy I was not prepared for his Twitter, it is _wild_
| newswasboring wrote:
| As soon as I saw his handle is literally "GodSend14" I knew I
| was in for a nice ride.
| someperson wrote:
| Eccentric like the late
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS creator
| newswasboring wrote:
| Lets call a spade a spade. Its not "Eccentric", he either
| has serious mental health issues or is an American far
| right conspiracy theorist. And don't you go implying that
| all American far right conspiracy theorists have mental
| health issues, that is not proven or even logical in many
| ways.
| [deleted]
| anamexis wrote:
| Link: https://twitter.com/godsend14
| smcl wrote:
| I deliberately did not include it as it has some pretty
| awful stuff
| so_this_is_me wrote:
| Wow you're not wrong about his Twitter, that was an
| adventure. It's so over the top I actually can't tell if it's
| meant to be satire.
| jcuenod wrote:
| Probably just a hacked account
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't think so. The "SOL" link on his page leads to
| even worse stuff.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I was just having fun when I wrote it. Just saw his twitter
| feed... wow...
| jtwaleson wrote:
| To be honest I did see some conspiracy stuff on his
| website, but I decided to ignore it and just focus on the
| beautiful Flash animations. Not sure how I feel about it.
| lfowles wrote:
| Whew, "some" is putting it lightly.
| smcl wrote:
| I think it's ok to separate the art from the artist, so
| to speak. The original site is indeed interesting and a
| nice example of Flash web design from the era, the
| Twitter acct doesn't change this
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm sorry. I looked at this website, and he explicitly
| blames me and my people for controlling and destroying
| the country (and the World Trade Center) and wants me
| destroyed. I can't look away from that. It's sad that
| that's OK on Y Combinator's Hacker News, but at least I
| know what I'm dealing with here.
| superdisk wrote:
| He's clearly an insane person. There's no use getting
| worked up about what some digital hobo is screaming.
| smcl wrote:
| If you interpreted this thread as an endorsement of anti-
| Jewish conspiracy theorists then I think you ought to re-
| read it. To restate in case it is unclear: the original
| author of the page turned out to have hateful views, but
| it needn't reflect at all on the homage that jtwaleson
| made and they shouldn't feel bad about it.
| patates wrote:
| I don't think you should feel bad for admiring his work.
| I'd hesitantly say that he may have some mental troubles
| and we should rather feel bad for him, which I personally
| do, sincerely. It's like how many admired TempleOS.
| kylowinter wrote:
| When trying to recreate the site in HTML5, how did you not
| notice the big "SOL" button on the flash page linking to
| his blog about how the Jews did 9/11 and other nonsense?
| jtwaleson wrote:
| See my other comment. I gave it a cursory look and
| ignored it and I'm not sure what I feel about that. I
| agree with some others in the thread and try to look at
| the "art" separately from the "artist".
| fortran77 wrote:
| Hacker News is full of people who support this sort of
| thing.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I can assure you that I do not support this.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| So wait, you tried to rebuild a flash website in javascript for
| the purpose of drawing conclusions about HTML5? How does that
| work? I mean, Flash and HTML5 are made for different purposes
| and use cases and HTML5 is not JavaScript.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Obviously the replacement needed a combination of
| HTML5/CSS3/JS.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Only partly true, but I will ask again: What does
| reimplementing a Flash site in JS have to do with "HTML5
| being ready"? How does HTML5 help you with rebuilding the
| same thing in _JS_? And why does that mean HTML5 is ready?
| Ready for what?
|
| It still doesn't connect. You can use JS to manipulate an
| SVG and animate it. You could theoretically just move
| absolutely positioned colored divs around ... Or you could
| draw things on a canvas. Does that mean HTML5 "is ready" or
| "not ready"? It has got nothing to do with it. But yaaay!
| Lets go! Downvote a comment, which points out a flaw in
| logic!
| jtwaleson wrote:
| > Ready for what?
|
| Ready to re-create the most amazing website in human
| history.
|
| > You could theoretically just move absolutely positioned
| colored divs around
|
| I would say that in practical terms, this would mean that
| HTML5 is not ready.
|
| > Downvote a comment, which points out a flaw in logic!
|
| You must be fun at parties ;)
|
| But if you want my final verdict: I agree with others in
| the thread that HTML is not a good replacement for Flash.
| Creativity was much easier to express in Flash.
| bendiksolheim wrote:
| You are not being downvoted because you point out logical
| flaws, you are being downvoted because you don't
| contribute to the topic.
|
| Are you not aware of the discussion about HTML5 versus
| Flash, or do you just disagree with using HTML5 as an
| umbrella term here? Even the Wikipedia article [0] about
| HTML5 has a section on Flash, discussing features such as
| sound, video, graphics and interactive elements. With
| "HTML5 being ready" I believe OP is referring to it being
| a viable alternative to Flash. There is a famous quote
| where Steve Jobs said that Flash is no longer needed,
| because there are viable alternatives to the features it
| provided - HTML5 among others.
|
| [0] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5#"Thoughts_on_Flash"
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I have never heard anyone use HTML5 as an "umbrella term"
| for meaning HTML5 + JS + CSS(3). Why would anyone do
| that? It is kind of silly to do that. That changes the
| whole meaning of the OP. Yes, I heavily disagree with
| such imprecise usage of terms, that changes the whole
| meaning. In that case my criticism would have been that
| the OP is not very clear / ambiguous.
| salamanderman wrote:
| Chill dude.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I have heard several people use it for that umbrella
| term, particularly back in the days when I lurked around
| following the WHATWG and CSS mailing lists.
|
| Consider that much of what is new in HTML5 vis-a-vis
| HTML4 is in the changes to its JS APIs (e.g., <canvas> is
| _all_ about the JS API), and its requirement that
| browsers support other standards such as SVG. Actually
| distinguishing which component of the web stack actually
| has a particular improvement that you seek to use doesn
| 't provide all that much value... what does it matter if
| it's really the WHATWG HTML spec that mandated it or it's
| the ES5 spec?
|
| Instead, you can just call it all "HTML5" and understand
| that it's using newer technologies that won't work on
| legacy browsers, although we're now so far deep into the
| era that we don't have a terminology for what requires a
| 2020 browser versus a 2015 browser.
| kalleboo wrote:
| https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#is-.
| ..?
|
| > _the term "HTML5" is widely used as a buzzword to refer to
| modern web technologies_
|
| This is because HTML5 includes elements like canvas, which is
| useless without JavaScript, but JavaScript would also be much
| less useful in the browser without canvas. So "HTML5" is a
| useful shorthand for what is made possible with HTML5-level
| browsers https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-
| html5-20141028/scripting-1.ht...
|
| Also this is post-HTML5 (HTML is now a living spec without
| version numbers), but the HTML standard now actually does
| include a bunch of JavaScript API specs, such as web workers
| https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/workers.html#introduc.
| ..
| [deleted]
| bigdict wrote:
| I couldn't stop laughing at this page, so dramatic.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| you know what we need? This implemented a bit further so it can
| be used to restore lost Flash screensavers. So much art and
| creative coding went into making some amazing screensavers a few
| which I still used up til Flash's nixing off Windows in January.
| bArray wrote:
| Bring flash support back to the web! Would be awesome that if
| that not only are they able to emulate the flash media player,
| but also fix the security issues too. Perhaps that's naturally
| what an emulator will give you?
|
| We should probably also be thinking about how browser support may
| continue for JavaScript in the future too. It's a matter of time
| until WASM reaches mainstream adoption.
| txtsd wrote:
| It does not handle neopets games well yet.
| Lukesys wrote:
| Is that possibly because in order to play the games in
| downloads the content on execution and I am pretty sure you
| have to be a logged in user to access the games.
| vfclists wrote:
| People think of it as being for games, but high quality
| applications used it as UI, a lot still do.
|
| Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap
| ecosystems. Todays mobile CPUs are an order of magnitude way more
| powerful than those of 10 years ago. The performance issue
| doesn't apply now.
|
| As for bugs, they can be fixed and they could have been fixed
| with the passage of time.
|
| The whole agenda of aiming to replace Flash with HTML5 and CSS
| was a dishonest fraud from the get go.
|
| 10 years on now and still nowhere near what was available 10
| years ago.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Flash was banned to protect the Google, Apple, Microsoft ap
| ecosystems.
|
| No. There was always a lot of Flash hate around, but it was
| tolerated because prior to HTML5 set of standards and the
| massive investment in JS performance, there was no way to do
| certain things in HTML/JS, so there was space for Flash. Post
| 2010 it became hard to justify Flash because you could now
| replicate everything Flash could do (though maybe in a more
| clunky way).
|
| >10 years on now and still nowhere near what was available 10
| years ago.
|
| I wouldn't say that. There is no good reason for Flash to exist
| anymore. The culture also changed. The younguns who were
| writing browser-based Flash games in 2004, are writing mobile
| games today, and the browser is not a popular gaming target
| anymore (with some exceptions here and there).
| lxgr wrote:
| I miss Flash too, but I don't miss the fact that the runtime
| was only available from a single vendor and only in binary form
| for the platforms they deemed important. The performance issue
| was never the main problem.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| So here's a silly question. If you can just get the official
| "projector" from Adobe (Flashpoint's approach?), what's Ruffle
| for? (Edit: Removed the last sentence, which was unhelpful.)
| Shared404 wrote:
| IIRC, Ruffle can be embedded in webpages, which I don't think
| the official projector can do.
| nevi-me wrote:
| Our Revenue Services got caught out with the Flash EOL. Their
| solution was to provide an Electron-based web browser, to much
| embarassment from those who could peek under the hood to see.
|
| It looks like they decided to bundle an older Chromium version
| that still supports Flash.
|
| I wonder if ruffle could have saved the embarassment, and worked
| as a safer stop-gap measure.
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(page generated 2021-02-05 23:03 UTC)