Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
    9·
    14 hours ago

    The problem isn’t animation - as you said there is raster video and also animated SVGs.

    The problem is that there is no way to package interactive content like there was. Flash wasn’t just animation, it was also games. And even flash animations often had interactive bits, like homestar runner Easter eggs.

    You can technically do it with JavaScript and HTML, but it’s difficult now and unfeasible back when flash died. Not only did the tools not exist, but html didn’t even have things like canvas yet for the tools to use.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      4·
      7 hours ago

      That’s not really true. You can do animation in HTML5 just like you could in flash. In fact, there are even quite a few ways you can acomplish the same.

      • HTML5 + JS
      • CSS + JS
      • There are multiple flash player projects running in WASM or JS
      • Animated SVG + JS

      All of that allows for animation, games and interactivity, no problem.

      There are dozens of tools that allow you to build flash-like animation and package it easily. Tons of game engines allow to export to HTML5, just at the press of a button. And there are still websites hosting browser games that fill that spot. There’s even HTML5 browser games that run in VR.

      But there are two big caveats:

      • With much more performance, storage and internet bandwidth, there’s no reason to go for flash-style skeletal animations. That’s not because it’s not possible, but because we have better alternatives.
      • Nobody hosts their own websites anymore and most platforms (large ones like Youtube, Facebook or Reddit, but also small ones like Lemmy) don’t allow you to just upload whatever HTML5 code you want. So if you want to reach more people, you’ll just upload a video instead.