Tom P Worknotes

BBC News: Resurrecting Flash stuff 20 years on

TLDR; here’s a couple of old Flash graphics I made at BBC News, brought back to life by Ruffle (though they still seem to suffer intermittent problems on iOS devices 😔):

  1. 2005 general election results map
  2. 2010 general election seat calculator

The issue

I was employed by the BBC News between 2004 and 2012 during which time I worked with a range of front and back-end technologies. My most visible work, the stuff that shaped my interests, and which I think had the greatest impact at the time, was all in Flash.

Unfairly (and fairly) maligned, there was a time when Flash was the only technology capable of delivering a certain kind of dynamic and interactive graphic, it acted as a kind of de-facto standard in the absence of browser parity and offered features and performance far in advance of what the web platform was able to provide at that time (and for years after its decline).

Flash did eventually die (the death blow was delivered by Steve Jobs in his rather disingenuous "Thoughts on Flash"1) and from about 2012 onwards the Flash player plugin could no longer be assumed to be installed on most browsers (we'd already started to move away from its use at the BBC; the improved performance of JS in the browser post Chrome (2008) and widespread, if imperfect, SVG support making some of what we did in Flash feasible using web standards).

Anyway this is a round about way of saying that much of my work from 2004 to 2012 is no longer available. Given the BBC’s position as a public service broadcaster and a pioneer of online news it strikes me as a shame that there are chunks of the archive that simply aren't accessible.2 Also, it's just irritating on a personal level.

A solution

Thankfully many talented individuals take both the work that was produced using Flash and archival practices seriously. So we have the Ruffle project which seeks to emulate the Flash player plugin using web standards technology. Over the Easter weekend I've been exploring Ruffle and have managed to get a couple of my old BBC projects up and running on my website.

My very first election map

Number 1 of 18(?) from our Peter Sullivan award winning 2005 general election coverage.

a map of the UK election results 2005

This was the obvious place to start. Back in 2005 there was no easy way to get complex vector shapes into Flash so I had to write a tool in Java to convert SVGs to binary SWF files (unlike the US election map of the previous year which was drawn in Flash the UK boundaries and coastline are sufficiently complex that it made sense to automate the import process). In addition to that hurdle the Flash project itself was an order of magnitude more complex than the simple web games I'd been making for museums and ad agencies up to this point. It was an intensely stressful few months so I like having something to show for it. In addition, it was (I think) the first live and interactive UK election map.

Seat calculator from the 2010 general election

a pie chart representing vote share sits alongside a hex map of the UK and some bar charts

This was something I really had to push to get time to build (squeezing it in between adding video of Jeremy Vine to our Swingometer which was the editorial priority) and I think my tenacity paid off (not always the case!), it was popular and well received.

Ruffle notes

One of the key features that ruffle has that made this possible is the ability to rewrite outgoing HTTP requests via a bit of configuration e.g. for the election map that looks like this...

window.RufflePlayer.config = {
        "urlRewriteRules": [
          [/http:\/\/newsimg.bbc.co.uk\/nol\/shared\/vote2005\/flash_map\/resultdata\/national_overview\.xml/, "/data/2005/national_overview.xml"],
          [/http:\/\/newsimg.bbc.co.uk\/nol\/shared\/vote2005\/inc\/77_99999\.inc/ , "/data/2005/77_99999.inc"],
          [/http:\/\/newsimg.bbc.co.uk\/nol\/shared\/vote2005\/flash_map\/resultdata\/([0-9]+)\.xml/,"/data/2005/$1.xml"]
        ],
      };

Final reflections

I plan to import some more of my old work over the coming months/ years. Ideally the BBC would pay someone (me?) to sort out this stuff on their website but from the outside my impression is that the people in charge at the BBC still don't really understand or value their website.

  1. My view here is that the key issue Jobs had with Flash was not its presence on the web per-se but its move towards providing a development platform for iOS devices that might cut Apple out the loop. There were tons of Flash developers creating wildly fun and creative games at the time and the ability for those people to port straight to Apple's platform represented a threat to their control of that platform.

  2. The BBC has been quite a bad steward of their online archive. This wasn't the case until about 2010 or so when Erik Huggers’ reorganisation and streamlining lead to the deletion of vast swathes of the website. Much of the BBC News archive (including some of the earliest pages) was saved by individual developers taking it upon themselves to back things up to their local hard drives and servers that were out of the management firing line until the "streamlining" was complete.