Somebody on Substack showed a 2005 online issue of The Onion, done entirely in FLV and SWF. The issue was a prophecy of 2025. They missed the basic point that Flash itself would be “outlawed” by the tech lords.
I’ve never understood why Flash needed to be “outlawed.” Allegedly it was “vulnerable”, but we know that cybersecurity is a fraud akin to the old loyalty oaths. Keep the yokels busy with magic spells to ward off fake spies so the real spies can work without hindrance.
FLV was a movie format, adequately replaced by MP4. No big loss.
SWF was interactive and POWERFUL. Everything you need in one package. I used SWF often in the first few years of this blog, from 2005 to 2013. The files are still there but of course browsers won’t play them now.
In 2014 I started switching my courseware from Windows executable to online. I intended to use SWF for the interactive parts. It was “outlawed” around the same time when I was making the transition, so I had to learn the MUCH LESS POWERFUL and much clumsier methods of HTML/SVG/CSS/JS.
Polistra's Mill 