I agree. In the early 2000s, I learned about animation through Flash. I remember working on a 9th grade project that I illustrated through Flash. I remember learning what frames were, what keyframes were, what vectors were, etc. It was just the right amount of non-technical for me to make sense of it.
Taking a step back, man what a different world it was back then. I'd fire up MS Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and go to town. The expectations have changed on the maintainability, usability, and functionality parts so I understand why we are where we are today. Both I do miss those simple days.
Flash was much more than animation. ActionScript was a fantastic language for developing dynamic client guis in. Flex's component based model was way better than what we have now -- basically typed webcomponents with a consistent runtime, and mxmlc and mxml was open source. Actionscript 3 was a fine language, with types and a nice compiler to work with.
Steve Jobs and browser security holes killed Flash, and no current open web platform covers all the use cases mxml and AS3 covered for cross-browser development. I could analyze audio channels, run lightweight process concurrency via green-threading, store user files, do i81n translation, streaming websockets and work with actual binary data types in the browser in 2006. I could trigger actions based on events in video and audio streams. I had consistently applied css with animations across components in 2006. I had reusable web components in 206. It's now 2018 and we still don't have cross-browser support for all of that. Oh, and I could run my app on the desktop in offline mode and in the browser.
Security was an issue. Looking back now, I think an Android-like permissions scheme is what it, and the browser, needs to fulfill the promise of write once run anywhere that the browser and the web tends to make.
It was heavily based off ES5, which really helped launch my Javascript abilities forward at the time. I was sad to see it go and ended up working with other technology that never felt as fun.
I remembered recently that Haxe was initially based off of MTASC (something I used in the later AS3 days), and checked it out. It's quite a stable ecosystem that feels very familiar in syntax. Add in HaxeFlixel, and it's almost like Flash never left.
Your timing is off, ActionScript 3 was based off the doomed ES4 which had classes etc. Adobe was even a main participent in the standardization process iirc.
Yup, AS3 was based completely on the ECMA draft at the time and was a spec implementation. Macromedia then later Adobe had representatives on the W3C board and due to politics, worry about compilation, the lack of "learning to code from reading source" and from what I recall concern for backward compatibility the draft was killed. Harmony was the next draft and it eventually evolved into ES5.
Completely agree with you... Going to browsers only from flash was like going 20 years backward. Even features available don't perform at same speed as flash.
Sad disaster
Taking a step back, man what a different world it was back then. I'd fire up MS Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and go to town. The expectations have changed on the maintainability, usability, and functionality parts so I understand why we are where we are today. Both I do miss those simple days.