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Comment by nntwozz

1 day ago

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.

13 comments

nntwozz

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zbendefy  1 day ago

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?

  • pava0  9 hours ago

    I strongly suggest you try (the selfhosted version of) Browsertrix from Webrecorder, it's really well done, actively delevoped and can export the website as .wacz without problem.

  • KPGv2  17 hours ago

    > 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.

  • KPGv2  19 hours ago

    > 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.