Another blow for Flash. As Adobe is stating that they will make the best tools for HTML5, another major website using Flash has announced they’re switching over to HTML5. Scribd, which provides in-browser access to all sorts of documents and e-books uploaded by users, will ditch its Flash-based website in favour of a brand-new HTML5 version.
Scribd is the largest website of its kind, hosting tens of millions of documents uploaded by users; a sort of YouTube for documents, if you will. Scribd works by converting uploaded documents into a what was formerly called iPaper, a PDF-like document technology for the web, which would then be displayed inside users’ browsers using Flash. Supported source document formats include any Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org format, PDF, PostScript, rich text, and plain text.
The Flash variant of Scribd looks like this – not at all very comfortable, in my view.
This is about to change, starting today. “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page,” Scribd co-founder and CTO Jared Friedman told TechCrunch.
Initially (which means today), only 200000 of the most popular documents will be made available as HTML5, but eventually, everything on Scribd will be converted to the new format – turning them into actual, real-world web pages, instead of walled-off Flash elements. “Right now the document is in a box,” Friedman said, “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.”
TechCrunch has the first screenshots of the new reader, and it indeed looks pretty darn good. It allows users to completely bypass the concept of an online e-book store, and no longer will users have to download PDF files onto their mobile devices or computers. They can just go to Scribd to read Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (if you haven’t read it yet, shame on you, you’re missing out on a vital experience) as if it were a web page. Scribd has partners such as The New York Times, New Yorker, Fortune, various publishing houses, as well as Ford, Accenture, and the FCC.
This news comes on the same day Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, stated that his company will create the best tools for HTML5. “We see whatever people are using to express themselves,” he said, “We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML 5.” In other words, it seems like Adobe is considering creating software designers can use to create compelling HTML5 stuff – much in the same way they today use Adobe’s software to do the same with Flash.
Good news, although I’m sure scribd will still suck.
More to the point though, what exactly are they doing now that couldn’t be done with HTML4? Google’s PDF quickview seems to manage fine without HTML5 or flash.
I just used the Flash version for the first time, and indeed sucks. But why would the new “Still suck”? Is there something about Scribd I don’t know? I didn’t know what it was until just now.
Google’s PDF quickview is just that – displaying a PDF in a frame. Scribd’s produces an actual web page. That’s quite something different.
Edited 2010-05-06 10:06 UTC
I don’t quite follow you. Google’s PDF quickview is ‘an actual web page’. It doesn’t even use any plugins, unlike Scribd.
Exactly. There is no need to use HTML5 in order to provide documents ‘as web pages’. Documents are not applications, HTML5 is about applications mostly.
If only the web browsers supported CSS2.1 we’d have additionally nice printing support (table of contents, splitting into pages, indexes etc). But instead we have this crazy race/buzz regarding HTML5.
Urgh. Know that all too well. I was battling with pathetic printing support in Firefox 1.0 and I’m still battling with it now. _All_ browsers suck at printing. It’s not an exciting area, but it has got to mature if HTML is going to start replacing native apps.
Unless they’re using html canvas to achieve the layout, then you’re probably right: this could be done with html4.1 and a few CSS3 properties (such as css3 text columns http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ )
I’m curious to see a page using the non-flash technique…
Hmm, I thought they used Flash to prevent copying text.
I’m curious as well. I figure that any scheme they implement will have some form of DRM (to keep content providers happy).
Edited 2010-05-06 11:30 UTC
If you can view it on your computer, you can copy it. Even if that means feeding your speaker out into an audio in on a recording device or, in this case, running screenshots through an OCR. (man, one would really have to want the text to OCR screenshots though)
For god sakes … you guys always make a big deal of this nonsense. You realize this is just the free market taking it’s course.. I do realize that many of you don’t believe in the free market (although you say you do), but yeah …… the market works itself out.
[ somewhat offtopic ramblings coming up, you’ve been warned
]
Well, that’s very liberal thinking, some might actually agree with that, I also partially do. But the fact is, sometimes you can see decisions being made that can lead to such wide changes in the web landscape that [could] result in something not all of us would like to see. E.g. changing certain ways of doing things into solutions that either [could] make the web a more closed and constrained environment, or leading to adoption of formats and delivery methods that point to a selected few holding the control in their hands.
In the case of scribd using flash or html5 to display textual contents in a closed-down format, it’s not a big deal, since in essence from the point of view of the users not much changes. But, as just one superficial example, content filtering in all-html5 pages will be much more harder than now with flash. Same thing going around around h.264/free alternatives, from the typical enduser point of view not much change, but in general we could end up in a cell not easy to move around in.
Back to the let the market drive thought, in the above cases it’s not really the market that drives these things, it’s the desires of certain companies to have tighter control over certain aspects of web content delivery, and them trying to convince others that their solutions actually try to solve some problems that we have. But it’s very seldom their problems coincide with the average users’ problems.
Edited 2010-05-06 12:57 UTC
I can tell you now it’s not. Try the Element Hiding Helper addon for AdBlock Plus. Click an element and you can hide it, or customise the CSS selector to target it.
HTML content gives us far more control over what content we see than any technology before it. You can veto anything and reshape anything according to tastes.
For example, see what I’ve done here: http://camendesign.com/art/if-i-designed-engadget. With Flash, it’s all or nothing.
The market is there, the problem is that it doesn’t value the same things that you do.
For example even though Silverlight is technically superior to Flash it is still having problems getting adopted since the install base of Flash is of greater value to companies than any technical advantages that Silverlight offers.
Good enough tech + high install base is typically favored by the market over better tech + low install base.
WTF it is not the free market, it’s the hand of god. If god didn’t decided so, it would not be so you idiot.
Or is it Gaïa?
Please get a brain man. The free market isn’t the almighty force that will provide us with naked virgins and save us from the wrath of Satan.
Wow, providing documents as web pages written in HTML, what a novel idea.
Great – it will work on the iPad, but is it going to be broken on FireFox and Opera?
Perhaps I should say more broken.
Scribd is a DRMvelope pretending to be a publishing site.
honestly I surf the web a lot (!) and I probably ended up on scribd twice… and never got anything useful out of it…
I hope you don’t intent to make a news story of every single website which make a change…
Now I can finally use scribd.
Very good news. I would like to thanks Scribd team behind this!
I have really pain reading this documents on scribd with flash, now it is much better.
As of technology. What features of HTML5 was used which have not been in previous HTML and JS? I find HTML5 buzz getting tension sometimes without technical reason behind it. By technical i mean that some people call HTML5 even “standard” Web 2.0 pages. To call something HTML5 it needs to use some new feature of HTML5 which was not available previously. This includes: video or audio tag, geolocation API, canvas, webgl, local storage, WebSQL, asynchronous JS, or some new markup tags (which isn’t really very important technically).
So why it is called HTML5 here and there?
What features of HTML5 are they using that are not already available in HTML 4?
Web-fonts is 1 feature that is pretty new.
If you want to see Scribd in HTML5 in action, check out http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5