sl-landingpage-2009
Restoration of my 2009 personal Flash landing page, rebuilt with modern Web standards.
Tried my best to make a 1:1 "porting" of the project but some details are missing or are a bit more complex to reproduce, and so far I'm quite happy with a 98% fidelity.
The big part of the porting is HTML & CSS, Javascript is used only to handle the loading and optimization of the .svg files via Webpack and to create the random coordinates for the toon image on a given interval, but the animation itself is a CSS Transition.
The links are more or less the same, except for the blog (moebiusmania.net doesn't exists anymore 😭) and the Facebook profile (since I've deleted it some time ago) they now points to my actual personal blog salvatorelaisa.blog.
Built on top of Vite.js vanilla-ts starter template.
Source material
I've only had the compiled Flash Player temp.swf file available, but luckily for me I was able to de-compile it thanks to the awesome jpexs-decompiler tool the allowed me to get the original ActionScript code, the vector images and the objects data.
In the ./src folder I've added all of the available source material:
- the original
temp.swffile, as both reference and backup - in the
/as_sourcethe ActionScript files I've written back in the days - in the
/svgthe vector graphics (the toon characters and social media icons)
Quick builds comparison
Since Flash has always being surrounded by misconception and false myths, let's just compare the outputs created by different compilers:
| Flash .swf | JS + Webpack | TS + Vite |
|---|---|---|
| 39.2kb | 58.4kb | 47.1kb |
For the "new versions" of this repo I've got the size from the Network panel in Chrome dev tools running from an Incongito window, so it's counting every file in the build output folder (html,css,svg,js) while for the Flash version I'm just looking the file size (you can do it directly in this repo).
It's true that Flash files didn't ran as standalone entities in browsers, you always needed to wrap them in regular .html files, sometimes using a particular Javascript utility to detect the Flash Player and display an alternative content/message that has a 10.3kb size.
Beside being more or less 8 to 20 kb smaller, the .swf file is also embedding the originally used font (Myriad Pro).
So maybe a Flash based project wasn't necessarily a network-intensive beast as many claimed, especially compared to current web standard. And remember that in this specific case, the .swf file has been compiled more than 10 years ago 🙂.
The performance issues were mainly related to the Flash Player rather than Flash assets or the compiler, but... that's another story and we all know how it ended.
License
Released under the MIT license.