Comment by dredmorbius
20 hours ago
Image-wise, SVGA + JS probably gets you the clarity. Standard gif / image animations not so much, if that's what you're referencing.
This isn't my baliwick, so I've absolutely nothing to say about the ease with which these options can be created.
Conceptually maybe you can compile flash to SVG+js but this has nothing to do with the point. Many insist (I have no direct experience) that the flash ecosystem (especially the editor) was and is unsurpassed as a publishing platform for interactive experiences.
Today with the current focus on mobile+low latency+e-commerce optimizations flash would probably have shown a lot of limitations, yet JavaScript, SVG, canvas, http webgl etc still fail to provide a "competitor" to what flash used to be.
The web simply went in a different direction, one that left many unsatisfied
The narrow point I was addressing was the claim "it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites".
SVGA graphics, being vector-based (as the name suggests), are indeed sharp, most notably when scaling up or down, and I've encountered SVGA-based interactive graphics which are reminiscent of Flash-based animations in that specific regard.
Again, I'm not addressing other aspects of these options, and I do very little direct development of this type.
I'm quite familiar with the claims that Flash was attractive to publishers and creators. On the receiving end, I was less impressed. Odd Todd excepted. The proprietary nature (I generally run Linux) and constant security concerns, as well as hiding web content within an inaccessible format (e.g., text couldn't be readily extracted) were all frustrations. I'm also generally not a fan of any animation.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Todd>
Modern web allows to disallow text extraction.