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Why aren't they ported to HTML5?

Uh, because they are? Hell, DHTML Lemmings is 11 years old. I don't know what you're worried about. Just play some Tappy Chicken or World's Biggest Pac-man or Pirates Love Daisies or HexGL or any of the many WebGL games out there.

Flash is in its Autumn. Mourn it not. Look at the pretty lights.

Obligatory, and still great:

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

http://www.javascriptgaming.com/2009/03/dhtml-lemmings.html

http://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer.html

I'm waiting for a HTML5 Lemmings (or lemmings clone). I mean, it's already been done in DHTML: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

This Lemmings clone dates back to 2004 so it's not HTML 5 but it's pretty good all the same.

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

Here's DHTML Lemmings written six years ago:

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

Here's an HTML5 particle system:

http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/parcycle/

Here's Quake II running in your browser:

http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/

Youtube can switch. But newgrounds is flash! I love newgrounds, and the flash games on it. HTML will never replace that.

I'm not so sure about that. DHTML Lemmings works pretty well and it was built 6 years ago.

Yes. See DHTML Lemmings. It was written six years ago.

There goes my day... Just don't tell my boss.

gad_zuki! makes a good point: Is the open Web capable of delivering an experience analogous to the Flash animations and games seen at, say, Newgrounds?

Yes. See DHTML Lemmings. It was written six years ago. WebGL is also on the horizon:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ - Lemmings in DHTML

This worked fine in IE6. Nothing here is all that impressive to me.

Maybe Linux users are the 1% leading the rest.

Sure thing, lead on.... http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

Another great one is DHTML Lemmings

If browsers were a good application framework, we wouldn't need Flash, Air, Silverlight, Java applets, XBAP apps, XUL, etc, etc etc.

Newsflash! We don't.

Flash was never welcome on the web. It was responsible for some of the most horrific, unusable sites known to man. For the most part it has disappeared from common UI use. However, it did manage to find two major niches:

1. A standard for Web Video (because no one can friggin' agree on a standard)

2. Online Games

#1 may eventually be taken care of by the new HTML5 <video> tag. Unfortunately, the powers that be still can't agree.

#2 *is* taken care of. Javascript games already exist:

PentriiX Online Multiplayer
DHTML Lemmings
Hull Breach Online
Tetris using Canvas
Pac Man using Canvas

XUL is a Mozilla technology primarily used to construct Mozilla apps. It is not a web language per se.

Air and Silverlight are solutions looking for problems. The latter is supposed to be a Flash killer at a time when Flash is already at the end of its life. Smooth move, Microsoft.

XBAP is effectively the heavy-weight daddy of Silverlight. Except that it's not really a web app.

The sooner we realize that trying to build an "application" directly in html+javascript+whatever-server-side-tech-you-like is a losing strategy, the sooner we can move onto something better.

So what you're saying is, the sooner we shut down GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Digg, Meebo, and every other DHTML app in existence, the better off we'll be*?

* Ok, maybe in the case of Digg we would be, but that's the exception that proves the rule!

Lemmings first - anyone fancy playing it in your browser? Try DHTML Lemmings - try not to kill it ;-)

Thalion went a long time ago, but released all of their stuff for the public - one of my favorites was the unfinished (in english at least) Ambermoon - an epic RPG - that, and many more, available on the Thalion Webshrine - break out your amiga emulators ;-)

Finally - one of my favorite games of all time was Captive. Sadly the sequel lost some of it's fun for science (to my mind) - it's another RPG, with you controlling a group of 4 droids. The intro music was brilliant - get it here, for a screenshot and a better description read the wikipedia entry. It is notable in that it had 65536 levels - each one having a *lot* of planets to explore... If you'd like to see a tribute to it appear, go check out the FreeCap Project - they need all the help they can get :-)