Adobe Systems announced last week Tuesday that they will finally be pulling the plug on the Flash product and will stop supporting it and the end of 2020, thereby bringing to end a definitive era in web history.
Flash is an incredibly long surviving technology for creating rich media content on the internet which probably gained popularity (or notoriety) first when Macromedia acquired a product by the name of FutureSplash Animator and rebranded it "Macromedia Flash" way back in 1995.
Adobe took over Flash in 2005 and has been supporting it ever since. However, in recent years, HTML5 content has started replacing Flash (for example in online video services like YouTube).
Now, however, the web developer who goes by the name of "pakastin" on GitHub has created a repository which is to act as a petition to save Flash by calling on Adobe to release the specification for Flash and open source whatever they can of the technology. Users can star the repository to show their support. At present, it is just shy of 4,500 "signatures".
As the Register mentions, pakastin argues that Flash should be kept alive because it is
“an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash means future generations can't access the past. Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten.”Whether or not these efforts will ensure a continued survival for the Flash software is unclear, as technologies like HTML5 and WebGL, which support things like video, animation, vector graphics and 3D content make Flash pretty obsolete. Even the Wikipedia entry for Flash starts off by calling it
...a deprecated multimedia software platformWell, there are still two-and-a-half years of Flash support left but in the meantime, you will be more and more hard pressed to find a website that actually sports Flash content. It will most likely survive only in the annals of internet history.
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