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Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″
- wmeredith 17y agoThank god. I like their product, but it's such a resource hog. Here's hoping that HTML5 Scribd will be a little more lightweight.
- thacker 17y agoJust in case anyone's wondering -- it's not just converting each page to an image. It's all HTML5 text, graphics, and images where appropriate.
- wmf 17y agoIs there anything specific to HTML 5 there?
- thacker 17y agoThe new viewer doesn't use the full spectrum of HTML 5 features, to maintain compatibility with older browsers, but it would not be possible before HTML 5.
- axod 17y agoWhy? What do you need from HTML5 to render a static document?? The AUDIO tag? VIDEO? websockets?
- matthiaskramm 17y agocustom fonts, for starters :)
- axod 17y agoTrue, but not convinced enough people care about custom fonts over rendering an image. It ends up being pretty much the same experience for them. (Actually custom fonts may well load slower for users, so it's a worse experience in some ways).
- stanleydrew 17y agoBut Google can't crawl images...
- earl 17y agoYou're seriously so pissy about scribd that you're currently objecting to their using standard html instead of images? Get a life.
- axod 17y agoI'm trying to figure out why they're bothering to solve something that's already been solved pretty well. eg: http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://infolab.stanford.edu... Users won't see any difference, or care. I do think scribd up to now has been pretty bad for the web, locking plain text documents and images up in their walled garden. Maybe they can change that, but what value can they actually add? What problem are they solving?
- tyler 17y ago
- statictype 17y agoAnything else besides custom fonts? Unless there's a subset of html5 features that I'm completely unaware of, I don't see how html5 brings anything useful to a text viewing app like scribd that wasn't already possible before...
- pedalpete 17y agotext rotation, shadow or indenting, etc. Lots of good 'print' looking stuff that was done with images or in flash before. Now Scribd gets to do it in straight html making it easier to index as well (I know flash in indexable, but I'm pretty sure there is a preference to text).
- zmmmmm 17y agoCan anybody name a single feature exclusive to HTML5 that it is actually using? TFA says: "Friedman estimates that 97 percent of browsers will be able to read Scribd’s HTML5 documents" That pretty much counts IE6 into the picture, so I'm really wondering exactly what "HTML5" features IE6 supports!
- bphogan 17y agoUsing the HTML5 doctype lets you use HTML5 tags and custom data attributes and have a valid document. New HTML5 form fields, custom attributes, and markup elements are usable in IE6 mainly because it just doesn't really bother to explode when it encounters them. Form fields just show up as text boxes, custom data attributes are only used in JS anyway, and new structural elements are usable and styleable in IE6 just by adding JS that does a document.createElement(). HTML5 isn't something that just came around. It's been in the works by browser makers for quite a while, which is refreshing. Rather than it being a spec made up in a purely academic environment (XHTML 2), it's something that's made up of technologies that have already been used by one or more browser makers (and often, developers on real sites.) Also, using the HTML5 doctype in IE6 causes IE6 to go into standards mode, which is just pure luck. You can do a lot of good for users if you start using some of the HTML5 features right now, even if it's not apparent. If you use the type="email" for your forms when you ask for an email, the ipod and ipad will bring up the Email keyboard layout. That alone is kinda cool.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agothis is great news. flash was just really overbearing and felt heavy. im sure it was also a bitch to deal on the back end. Can't wait to play around with it. ps- i win newsyc bingo: YC company, techcrunch article, HTML5.
- jorgeortiz85 17y agoBzzzt! You're missing: Apple, Facebook. Try again.
- whatusername 17y agoHe got Adobe Flash and HTML 5. That's tangential enough to almost include Apple. Needs: * Facebook integration (or even better for HN cred - removing facebook connect) * "Now works on iPhone/iPad"
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoFind out how a 30 year old lean startup,Apple, made billions by opposing facebook privacy issues and furthering HTML5 on the iPad by acquiring Kiko (YC S05). (techcrunch.com)
- whatusername 17y agoAlmost perfect. I just realized we missed Erlang.
- krishna2 17y agoDoesn't scribed use erlang?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- thiele 17y ago"Betting the company"? Sounds a little dramatic. It's HTML5 not Silverlight. How much risk is there really?
- FlorinAndrei 17y agoMy thoughts exactly. HTML5 is going to be (or is already) everywhere, so where's the big risk?
- potatolicious 17y agoPerformance maybe - but it's hard to imagine any HTML5 implementation to be slower than Flash is. Also, HTML5 isn't arriving on IE for some time yet, and even then it may take years for the general public to update to something that can render HTML5 properly. I wouldn't use any of the more complex/less-supported features of HTML5 on any live site today, that's for sure.
- watmough 17y agoReally? I always thought that Flash was quite performant compared to browser-based Javascript. Can you point to any benchmarks?
- MartinCron 17y agoFlash performance varies widely. Flash on Mac OSX is generally regarded as terrible, while Flash on Windows isn't as bad.
- earl 17y agoIf by generally regarded, you mean literally blows chunks... ffs, VLC is open source and it performs better on my macbook pro. Adobe is too incompetent even to copy freely available code.
- deleted 17y ago
- codexon 17y agoI hope they succeed and HTML5 replaces Flash, but this seems like a very risky move.
- joubert 17y agoGoogle already does a great job of showing PDF files using HTML and JavaScript. Don't think it is huge risk. Plus the upside is their stuff will then work on mobile devices too.
- thacker 17y agoGoogle rasterizes the PDF and streams it to you as an image. Scribd will be converting documents to HTML and CSS while maintaining a near perfect facsimile of the original document.
- axod 17y agoGoogle does a lot more than that. For example copy and paste works if you select some text and copy it out. That's non trivial.
- jamesjyu 17y agoThat is true, their conversion understands text regions and various other things. However, what makes Scribd's viewer more sophisticated is that it will actually use structured HTML to render the document content. This is more than just putting on a layer that specifies regions in the document, it will actually just be a normal HTML document, made of divs, text, images, etc. Plus, it will maintain the fidelity of the document -- meaning that even PDFs with complicated layouts will be rendered properly in HTML. No trivial task.
- axod 17y agoWhat will be the main advantage? It's a great technical challenge, but will users notice the difference?
- wallflower 17y agoSeems like a route to a possible acquisition by Adobe or Google. The technical constraints of HTML5 make it interesting.
- zweben 17y agoI'll be interested to see how they will deal with the licensing issues regarding font embedding. Right now, there aren't a whole lot of non-free fonts that allow @font-face embedding, because embedding a font with @font-face makes the font downloadable to anyone with a little digging through CSS files for its URL. I hope a solution is found for this that doesn't require specific allowance of CSS embedding in the license. If it does, some fonts will never be legal to embed.
- benologist 17y agoEmbedding in general will be interesting... being able to ctrl+c/ctrl+v anything you want straight to your blog/website/spam site has to impact their reach.
- petercooper 17y agoThe fonts are what interest me too. Not just the licensing, though (that never stopped YouTube with its videos - at least not for a few years!) but with having to convert a myriad of fonts embedded in documents into SVG fonts (otherwise they won't work on the iPad).. that's no mean feat.
- ars 17y agoWhy does everyone worry about fonts so much? You can download a copyrighted image just as easily, and you can copy paste the copyrighted text too. So what's the big deal that you can copy the font? And the most ridiculous thing is that fonts aren't even copyrightable. (You can copyright the actual file with the fonts, but not the shape of them.)
- benologist 17y agoThis is a good move. HTML is a better and more natural feeling format for long documents than Flash (and PDF readers) ever were.
- TrevorBurnham 17y agoIf they really can display PDFs accurately using HTML5, that's great, and plenty of other companies (including CrocoDoc) would benefit from following suit. But PDF still does a lot of things that HTML doesn't, like first-class font embedding (@font-face won't cut it). I'm not sure whether this is the right time to make the switch, though me and my iPad wish them luck.
- jarek 17y ago"Now any document can become a Web page." Now if only I didn't have to log in to read it.
- hackworth 17y agoyou have to log in to read documents on Scribd? i've never had to.
- jarek 17y agoWas it to view them as the source PDF rather than their Flash approximations, then? I can't remember, but they /did/ get on my nerves more than once requiring an account to get at the hosted content.
- s3graham 17y agoYes, it was for the pdf. Clutter the web with SE spam, and the make you log in to get the real document. Gee, thanks.
- qeorge 17y agoHow big of a role did SEO play in this decision?
- snowmaker 17y agoGood question, but none, really. It won't affect our SEO - we did this to improve the user experience on the site.
- _pius 17y agoWhile it may not have played a major role in your decision, you have to know that this will dramatically improve your SEO. Come on. :)
- megablast 17y agoWhy? Google already indexes flash, and you can include meta-tags in flash as well. As long as you are doing it right, I can be just as informative as html.
- benologist 17y agoYou're right in general with the flash/seo stuff, but they appear to be already extracting all text anyway to present to search engines so maybe there isn't really much advantage: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ggG39gKeE-gJ:www.scribd.com/doc/28600392/Bali-Beyond-Magazine-January-2010-edition+http://www.scribd.com/doc/28600392/Bali-Beyond-Magazine-January-2010-edition&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ggG39gK... One thing that does occur to me is that copy and paste auto attribution link stuff that's getting popular on news sites, something like that could hold more value / less overhead / easier to spread than the awkward embedded widget approach.
- tamersalama 17y agoActually - I heard it did
- jackfoxy 17y agoIronically the page is causing me a stack overflow in IE8.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dmoney 17y agoIt looks like it's still flash. Why announce this before it's done?
- gojomo 17y agoTo get at least two waves of attention: (1) announcement; (2) delivery.
- jacquesm 17y agoIf this doesn't rely on HTML5 features, why call it HTML5? DHTML or javascript would have been good enough then, wouldn't it?
- daleharvey 17y agoif they are using html5 features and degrading gracefully, as most html5 does by default anyway, why not say you are using html5? for one it might help push a few people into using more html5 capable browsers.
- jacquesm 17y agoThey only use features of HTML5 that are also supported by older browsers: From the article: "Friedman estimates that 97 percent of browsers will be able to read Scribd’s HTML5 documents because those parts of the standard are older and more widely adopted." I don't read that as 'graceful degradation', but as a subset based on older tech.
- tyler 17y agoWe create basically the same experience across browsers, but use the latest tech that the browser supports. For instance, things will render much faster in Chrome than in IE6. However, the documents will basically look the same across all of our supported browsers.
- cageface 17y agoI'm not happy with the way Apple's been throwing its weight around on this issue but all the same I'd much rather see this kind of thing implemented in HTML than in Flash.
- jacoblyles 17y agoGreat. Now I might not cringe every time I see a Scribd link. A flash PDF reader is worse than useless. I can't use flash on my iPhone, and the Scribd reader used to break back when I used an Ubuntu machine. And it certainly never ran great on my Mac. When you consider that I already had perfectly fine, and free!, PDF readers on all three devices, Scribd was actively harmful. But an HTML 5 PDF reader could actually be useful! It may be more lightweight than downloading a whole PDF. It will certainly be no worse than what I can currently use to render and read a PDF. This is good. Scribd may change their image as a widely hated startup.
- jacoblyles 17y agoI get it, we'll ignore the fact that Scribd makes the web a worse place when the founders are in the thread.
- BrandonM 17y agoWell that's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. How can a website make the web a worse place? A website either provides something you can't get anywhere else, which is intrinsically valuable, or you can just ignore the site.
- jacoblyles 17y ago>How can a website make the web a worse place? It's easy. Someone sends you a Scribd link. Scribd is written in Flash so maybe you can't read the damn thing. Before Scribd, people would just send you PDF links. Everybody can read PDFs. Scribd harms the web by reducing the number of people who can view its content. That's what I call "providing negative value".
- vineet 17y agoIf they are moving from flash to html5 then how are they drawing? You can get alot of drawing flexibility if you use Canvas, but performance of any Canvas-bridge for IE makes it not worth using.
- whalesalad 17y agoNo offense to Scribd, but what is wrong with viewing a document in your browser using something like Safari? I realize that not all machines are capable of this, but they could pretty easily. Someone asked the other day, "Why doesn't Windows have a native PDF reader?". Surely it's possible for all browsers to quickly and properly render a PDF, with easy controls to navigate. I understand the added benefits of being able to comment, discuss, share, etc.. your documents with Scribd, but honestly why the need for HTML5 or anything at all? PDF's are viewable just fine in a simple PDF viewer.
- netcan 17y agoWell, they don't. Not currently anyway.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- thewileyone 17y agoI don't get it. It's a shift of technology from one platform to the next. Content, such as ads, is going to be the same. So one gee-whiz thing to the next is just going to result in the next generation gee-whiz ad-blocker.
- jaekwon 17y agoNice. Thank you, it's about time.
- mrvir 17y agoHTML5 really makes sense for the online viewing. Guess PDF will stay as popular offline reading format. At least until we get some universal cross-platform/cross-browser webarchive format. Could be an idea for a start-up ...
- johnyzee 17y agoI've worked for a big Scribd competitor (bigger than Scribd by some measures) and I am blown away that they would move in this direction. Those saying that they are not taking a great risk are missing the point in a serious way. In this business, the viewer is the company. It is your whole competitive advantage. Taking apart a PDF is nothing - putting it back together in Flash with the right appearance, cropping, individual character metainfo, hyperlinks, caching, progressive loading, etc., etc., is science. To do that you need to be very long on Flash, and they just threw away all that inventory and expertise. Which is, of course, a killer move if they can actually pull it off as they will be the first and only company to do it (again, comparing with Google's Javascript PDF viewer misses the point, as that 'just' renders images). I am just dumbstruck to see a company do such a 180 degree turn and they deserve all the credit in the world for having the guts.
- briansmith 17y agoWon't everybody using Flash be able to do the same thing with Flash CS5's <canvas> + FXG support? Isn't the point of this move to support the iPad, the iPhone, and other non-Flash environments?
- MartinCron 17y agoI don't normally like the "betting the company" metaphor as I feel it's overused and over-dramatic. There's also a sense of motivating staff with fear, in that if you don't work hard enough or if you make any mistakes, we'll lose this bet and the company will fail and everyone here will be out of work. No pressure, or anything, though :) When I met Microsoft's Chief Software Architect at PDC last year, he kindly thanked me for "betting on Azure" and I thought to myself "I'm just experimenting with a new technology that may make my life easier, I try my best not to ever bet on anything". Not wanting to be a smart-ass jerk, I just talked about lolcats and 4chan instead. Reading about what Scribd is doing, it seems that the metaphor is pretty appropriate.
- greyfade 17y agoCool. Maybe now I'll actually be able to log in and view a document? Because I never have been able to before.