Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog brings back the joy of surfing the web during the heyday of Adobe Flash (minus the 100% CPU).

It's so much fun manipulating things, exploring and getting surprising feedback.

I know it's not really fair to compare this highly scientific masterpiece to the artistic flash websites of the past, but for me at least it immediately evokes the same feelings.

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zbendefy 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Tangential, but Flash had a nice side effect that the "app" could be exported in a self contained way via SWF.

Exporting this site for example in a future proof way is not that obvious. (Exporting as pdf wont work with the webgl applets, exporting the html page might work but is error prone depending in the website structure)

50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files, but these sites might be lost. Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

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KPGv2 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> 50 years from now, flash emulators will still work on swf files

I'm not sure 50 years from now there will be flash emulators. Who is going to write on for the XP3.12345235 Fruity Ununpentium Silicon x256^2 neuralink devices.

Didn't Flash die because iPhones weren't going to support it? So one of the major OSes people spend most of their lives on can't even run SFW files. Can Android? I've honestly never tried.

But web standards persist.

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KPGv2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Or is there a way to archive sites like this?

A couple days ago, someone published their archive of HN that works in any browser.

Archiving sites is easy anyway. I wrote a Scrapy app that archives everything within the a specific fandom on Ao3. TH hardest part is remembering how beautiful soup queries work.

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roywiggins 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Static sites are straightforward, yeah. Highly dynamic websites like this one commonly explode when you archive them naively.

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mrkstu an hour ago | parent [-]

Server side rendered sites that are dynamic in nature- you'll only get a literal snapshot of state you happen to be in...

	▲	roywiggins an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I mean highly dynamic, entirely frontend sites like these are hard to archive, since you have to really preserve every bit of JavaScript dependency, including any dynamically loaded dependencies, and rewire everything to work again. And then hope that whatever browser features you rely on aren't removed in 20 years. Flash applets from 20 years ago are usually more self-contained and Just Work if you have a functioning runtime (either the official one or Ruffle)