I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.
> Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere.
Do you see the irony? This is a very selective example by itself. The table based minimal HTML + CSS websites existed throughout the decades (even so today) which is what I'm referring to specifically.
I'm not dunking on your whole argument, but as for this specific point: as someone who finds the mouse difficult to use and requires the keyboard a lot, the web definitely used to be a lot more accessible in this regard. There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.
Nobody added those attributes in the 90s/2000s either, it's just that desktop apps (like browsers) all implemented keyboard navigation properly by default.
The real loss here isn't html authors being too lazy to add the attribute, it's that our modern desktop environments/apps stopped implementing keyboard navigation as a default
What do you have now with all your fancy React and JS libraries that's pulled off something that Flash did?
Flash died because of the carcinogen that Adobe is. It could have been the future of HTML5 had they actually invested in it.
Look at the pathetic state of HTML5 today. What tool should a non-coder use to output something you could do with keyframes on Flash studio in 5 minutes in the 2000s? There's absolutely nothing quite the equivalent of Flash. You need to write 100+ lines of code to get something decent out of HTML5 that involves animation. There are paid niche tools, but nothing at the scale of what Flash pulled off.
> You're referring to the mid-late 2000s
Things like hidden iframe hacks to load JavaScript were a thing as far back as the late 90s, and table layouts have existed as long as HTML tables have.
Very much the latter. Apple didn't want to give Adobe control of a big part of their new ecosystem - and they were already at loggerheads over Apple shipping native PDF capabilities in OSX
Not true.
