Flash. The transition to JS + canvas wasn't too bad for games, although JS games can't be distributed as single files, but for animation I don't think there's anything like it anymore. And we forget how much of early internet culture was driven by 4chan's Flash board, which you can only have with things like .swf files - relatively small single files that can contain an entire game/animation.
Agree 100%. In one sense, the barrier to creating and distributing software is lower than ever before… but in another sense, it's much higher. Pre-teen me would have had a much harder time grokking the modern web tech stack or Unity than learning how to make basic animations and games in either of those two apps.
Sure, the runtime sucked. But not in any way I cared about as a kid! Plus, this is a hypothetical scenario, so we can have it be good :)
No. Many of the things that made flash interesting just don't work when you're disturbing as HTML5, not the least of which is distribution - flash animations are one file, whereas HTML5 has at least a HTML file and a JavaScript object, but in practice doesn't ever get distributed that way at all. More often it's simply turned into a movie and distributed through YouTube... Which ruins much of the charm. Not just from resolution/compression issues. Flash animations, being vector based, scaled to any monitor, and even YouTube's 1080p just doesn't look nearly as good, because of compression algorithms optimized for live action video - if they actually compressed properly, they could get similar quality, but the price would still be way higher. Flash animations were typically sized mostly for their audio track - 3-4 MB of mp3 and 400k of animation code.
Then there's the whole thing about interactivity. Many of flashes best moments were Easter eggs. Most SBEmails have two or more. There's something about the hunt and realizing you "discovered" the extra bit that makes it so much more fun than a stinger.
Last but not least: flash is now much more... Hard to pirate. Much of flash animation was created by students and kids who were working with a tool they wanted to learn and with zero budget. It was an act of creative rebellion. It's hardly impossible, but it's not the same as it was.
The other large part is that flash is no longer as new and impressive and pioneering as it was. That bit can't be reclaimed, no matter what, but is also a shame. Exploration and boundary pushing was a huge part of all of what made flash so amazing - people realized that it could do "anything" and so did. That pioneering spirit lasted for a very long time, considering - the indie game scene is still riding the wave that flash started - but for animations, that hump is past and not least of which because it ran into the brick wall of iOS Safari.
I would also want to see Adobe Air opened sourced if Flash gets open sourced or re-implemented, Apache Flex is already opened. I think Flex4 and Microsoft WPF are the best way to create GUIs for apps
