I want 1990s Internet back. Except for background MIDIs, which should be banned elsewhere but which should be made legally mandatory on music-related pages. Forcing record companies to share literal performance instructions for their music would annoy them gloriously.
Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.
In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.
In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.
Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.
I also wonder what animals think of how they are depicted in culture.
Picture related: An animal furious after finding out they’re being depicted as villains in a popular video game series