That’s what Flash was, and it was terrible.

I think some things work better when they’ve evolved from simplicity to complexity, and application hosts seem to be one of them.

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pjmlp 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apparently not, given that it is exactly what WebAssembly folks are after, unfortunely with much worse tooling than Flash Studio had at our disposal.

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ezst 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Flash was terrible for producing documents, I suppose, but for highly interactive things, nothing matches it, even today (we are getting close in terms of what the web is capable of, performances are getting good, but the tooling and implementation effort/complexity is ridiculous in comparison).

I don't think it's so much a question complexity than a question of using the "right tool for the job". Web technologies were never designed for that, never engineered to be extensible. Web apps is a hack, it's terrible, and that's all because of politics.

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ndriscoll 4 days ago | parent [-]

Web technologies were designed to be extensible, for documents. e.g. HTML has had a built in templating engine and support for websites defining their own custom tags for 25 years.

	▲	ezst 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely, the context there was "extended from simple Document/Markup jobs and into rich applications toolkits".

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owebmaster 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Flash was amazing and we lost a good amount of fun online when Apple killed it

	▲	brookst 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The PRD for Flash was amazing, the implementation was pure crap. It had more bugs than functioning code, and more security issues than APIs.