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So I read this article last night about Flash game preservation https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/10306/9585?inline=1
and it got me thinking about other ways the study of web design history will be affected when Flash fades away.
and it got me thinking about other ways the study of web design history will be affected when Flash fades away.
Even though I was mostly rubbish at Flash (there were good days and bad, getting up from my desk with my head spinning days) trying to master it, and monitoring what people were doing with it still helped some of dictate what and how I learned about web design.
Of course there were brilliant websites made entirely in Flash - here are a few that were really important for me.
Haunch of Venison: a grid, but animated! (really difficult to find screenshots of this)
https://spin.co.uk/work/haunch-of-venison https://www.siteinspire.com/websites/332-haunch-of-venison
https://spin.co.uk/work/haunch-of-venison https://www.siteinspire.com/websites/332-haunch-of-venison
Billy Harvey music: about the only website that was worth watching and listening to https://thefwa.com/cases/billy-harvey-music
Vodafone futures: I have no idea how many hours of work went into this https://thefwa.com/cases/vodafone-future-vision
It looks like when flash goes large chunks of the archives of sites like the The FWA https://thefwa.com/ will disappear.
But there was also the way Flash acted as what we now call a 'polyfill' to suggest new features web browsers and CSS needed. The best example I can think of is SiFR, a way of using custom typefaces before this was added in CSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Inman_Flash_Replacement
Also the increasing importance of JavaScript in the 2000s could be traced back to things like SWF Object (hosted on google code - remember that?) to get around the flash player's invalid HTML code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWFObjectsifr
So there was this conversation between designers and developers, or what Christopher Kelty calls a 'recursive public' - people who could define and create prototype versions of the new features they wanted in web browsers https://twobits.net/
The ability to still see these technologies working - or understand the need for them - will disappear as Flash goes away. There are books and blog posts but the code will be harder and harder to get working, and it will only be old people like me who will remember it.
It's also interesting to compare the preservation of flash web design with things like the CSS Zen Garden, which is 17? years old, and still renders CSS and HTML happily on desktop http://www.csszengarden.com/
If you find this sort of thing interesting - we have a job you might be interested in teaching and researching web design and development - find out more here. https://manmetjobs.mmu.ac.uk/jobs/vacancy/lecturer-in-web-design-2798/2809/description/
