On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Matt S. wrote:
> Warning: Typical TechCrunch hyberbole and schadenfreude ahead.
>
>
> Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″
> Read more:
> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/scribd-html5/?qfds#ixzz0nBF5BxSv
>
I agree with your first statement.
"Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online
documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing."
...
"Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be
viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web
pages."
They've clearly not seen the issuu Flash document viewer / haven't heard of
the full screen feature (not perfect, but their statement is inaccurate),
"boxed off curiosities" can be a very useful thing if the document is part
of content ( a supporting piece etc) and not the main spectacle. I mean, it
will also be a "boxed off curiosity" in HTML5 if users simply want to embed
it within their blog.
"Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser
(see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from
documents to native Web pages."
I really don't understand the relevance of the first part of this sentence,
looks like a paid advert to me. The second part is the only [partially]
valid point in the entire article. No one is perfect, there are always
trade-offs to be made when choosing a platform.
"Documents will simply become very long Web pages. A new bookmark feature
will help you keep your place in especially long documents."
I am currently developing a similar feature in Flash. I store the character
index of a selected location and enable the user to make a comment on it.
Users can easily jump between these "points". This isn't very hard to do.
"Scribd’s documents will be especially iPad friendly. Instead of downloading
a book from Apple’s iBooks store or Amazon’s Kindle app, you can see if an
electronic version is on Scribd and read it in your browser."
Irrelevant. These are not valid reasons for favoring HTML5 over Flash.
"Pinch and zoom to make the text bigger. No download necessary."
I don't see the relevance of the first part. For the second part, in Flash,
there are two ways you can transfer the document, one is to store it in the
browser cache (downloading is clearly happening) or you can "stream" the
documents [in which case they're right]. If the documents are going to be
long Web pages, then surely, certain aspects of the documents are going to
end up in the cache, in that case, No Download necessary is misleading. I
know the point they're trying to make, but, technically, the statement is
inaccurate.
"Scribd’s currently uses a Flash player much like YouTube’s to allow people
to upload and view documents on the Web. But with HTML5 standards now making
their way through not browsers, there is little reason to do that. “Right
now the document is in a box,” says Friedman, “a Youtube-type of experience.
There is a bunch of content and a bunch of stuff around it. In the new
experience we are taking the content out of the box.”"
Trying to compare Scribd document viewer to YouTube video player is beyond
me. Enough said.
In the new experience, you're taking content out of one box and putting it
in another.
"Friedman has ben [sic] working secretly on this project for the last six
months. You can tell he’s excited about it. He believes the Web is finally
ready to ditch Flash for documents. Unlike video players, the parts of the
HTML5 standard that impact documents have to do with support for fonts,
vector graphics, and rotating text."
The blatant spelling error in the first sentence demonstrates quite clearly
that this article was not reviewed properly. Besides being a paid advert
for a completely useless device, this article offers no solid technical
reason to ditch Flash in document delivery systems. Seriously, how many
business documents / books / articles in general have you seen that have
rotating text in them? I have had to deal with such creatures (once in an
entire year), and it is possible to do so in Flash, however, this isn't a
compelling reason to abruptly switch platforms.
"HTML5 documents will still be embeddable in other sites using an iFrame."
So if they're embeddable as Flash, they're a "boxed off curiosity", but if
they're embeddable as an iFrame, they're not. Need I say more?
I am looking forward to HTML5. I am playing around with it and I must
admit, I love it. I strongly believe that switching platforms should be a
decision I need to make for sound technical reasons or to cater for user
demand. I certainly do not believe that we should "ditch" Flash just
because certain companies do not like it. That doesn't make any sense. As
long as the plugin is in widespread use, it should be supported.
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