4 ms·

Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

13 points by mikecane 17y ago

jsmcgd 17y ago
Don't give me problems, give me solutions. And by me I mean scribd, not me.
lenni 17y ago
He's kinda right, a file format meant for printing fixed size pages will inevitably suffer from some impedance mismatch when automatically converting it to a relatively simple document format meant for screens. But I disagree with the claim that it isn't HTML. It sure isn't pretty but a if you define HTML as the input that the HTML parser of today's browsers can handle (rather than the HTML spec) it is perfectly fine.
mustpax 17y ago
Web applications are not the same as web pages. A web page is a document, which ought to have simple clean markup. A web application on the other hand is a tool that can edit said documents. It's more "meta." To expect the tool to have the same sort of semantic purity as the documents it interacts with is overly idealistic. It doesn't matter as much what we can systematically infer about an application, it is more important that the content be accessible in some sort of standard format. Similarly, Scribd's HTML5 viewer, is just that, a viewer. Not a full fledged PDF to HTML converter. It's primary purpose is to allow a user to experience a document in its entirety in the browser. In a world of trade-offs, and priorities, the markup of the viewer itself is near the bottom.
- alexyim 17y ago
  That's what I thought too. Sounds like this guy doesn't really get web apps.
- baddox 17y ago
  Would you really consider facebook to be a "web app"? I think facebook is, or at least should be a pretty normal web page.
  - robryan 17y ago
    Far from it, amazing complexity in how certain parts of the page load and certain page changes are coming through ajax. Very much a web app, probably as complex as any web app out there.
    - baddox 17y ago
      There's no reason for so much complexity. I'm talking of course about the core of facebook, not the third-party apps. Sure, asynchronous loads of certain content is nice, but it hardly qualifies it as a "web app"? Which parts of facebook are you referring to?
gruseom 17y ago
This reads like self-parody. The author doesn't like the way their <P> tags are positioned. Could there be a more ridiculous criticism? From where I stand, Scribd's HTML5 implementation (if it turns out as good as the demo) is one of the biggest leaps forward I've seen on the web in a while, as well as one of the most impressive pivots I've seen a startup make to turn a negative into a positive. It's a huge technical challenge to do what they're doing and get it right; one of those things that seems hard to people who haven't worked on it and turns out to be far harder than it seems. There's also the minor detail that they're producing this output for an enormous class of inputs, so to nitpick the generated HTML as if it were written by hand is to miss the point colossally. Edit: on another note, it's probably a positive sign if people with this mentality don't like your work.
timdorr 17y ago
And if it were proper, semantic HTML5, what problem would that solve? I'm failing to see what benefit that has to the user. They don't need to see the markup; it just has to work.
invisible 17y ago
I think this dude needs to read the first part of Coders at Work with Jamie Zawinski (in reference to Netscape). A version 1 system RUSHED to the public that actually works and has few bugs is amazing. The fact that it's difficult to read and hard to follow can be fixed just as bugs can in due time. I think the concept of "get it done and fix it later" is better than "take forever to work on it and someone already produced." I guess that's an age-old question we all ponder though.
- petercooper 17y ago
  He seems to be more peeved that it was promoted with the term "HTML 5." He has a point on that, if so. Do we want to see the term diluted to mean almost anything with a valid DOCTYPE, as Web 2.0 and AJAX were? Half the things on Delicious that are tagged AJAX are just basic Javascript..
  - armandososa 17y ago
    I think the problem is having the specification named "HTML5", if it has been named (as it was originally intended) "Web Applications 1.0" all this misunderstandings will go away.
Legion 17y ago
If the author can't be bothered to even pick out a couple of snippets to support his claim, I can't be bothered to pay his post any mind.
snowmaker 17y ago
Well, sure - what's he expecting? PDF is a low-level, mostly unstructured display format. Converting that to fully semantic markup that recognizes all aspects of high-level document structure is probably an AI-complete problem. For those of you not familiar with the gory details of PDF, it basically uses absolute positioning for each character. If we converted that directly into HTML it would be a disaster. So, we actually extract quite a bit of structure on top of that, recognizing spaces, lines, columns, and paragraphs, which enables us to write much cleaner HTML. Scribd (and most PDF readers) does this with heuristic algorithms that make reasonable guesses. In the future, we'd like to push those algorithms further, and extract ever more semantic markup. But this is a "nice to have" for us - mostly, people just want the documents to display correctly and load quickly. And, anyway, expecting the output of an automated converter to match what a human would write shows a basic ignorance of the state of computers and AI.
- ilike 17y ago
  In my opinion, web based documents should have certain level of semantic purity. Of course there will be technical difficulties to achieve it, but that is what hackers are for. Right? While you have the right to justify the lack of semantic markup in Scribd html docs, he has the right to expect a non-messy markup underneath. Calling someone's expectation "ignorance" isnt very fair.
  - alextgordon 17y ago
    The author of the article is being ignorant by not understanding the basic differences between PDF and HTML before going off on a rant about it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jasonkester 17y ago
When people start whinging about the HTML markup for your thing, you know you're on to something. Early on, we got a guy complaining loudly about how Twiddla sucked because we had put a DIV into the HEAD tag to display a loading message. Not sure exactly how it affected his user experience, but there you go. If the best criticism that people can come up with is about a piece that nobody can ever see or be affected by, you're probably doing something right.
tlrobinson 17y ago
"every major HTML5 app today is built using un read able markup" Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that applications be built using technologies and best practices designed for documents? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup. However it often absolutely does make sense to render the documents created with these applications in clean markup. That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
jdietrich 17y ago
The real lesson here? There are no awards for correctness. If the biggest and best webapps use pig-ugly HTML, the rest of us can probably stop worrying. Build it, launch it, bodge it.
petercooper 17y ago
OK, this guy is ragging on what is a good tech demo, but "HTML 5" seems to be the 2010 equivalent of saying "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" when it comes to getting early adopters to check out your stuff, and Scribd threw around the term without it being, hmm.. authentic.. (that is, HTML 5 as a concept means more than merely producing a document that would pass validation)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
armandososa 17y ago
It's like 2004 all over again. Back then, some people were complaining that "links" on Gmail where not really links, but underlined blue paragraphs with onclick events. Remember that? This was the most advanced web application ever made, it had 100x the storage capacity of every mail provider at the time, awesome search capabilities, and the first mainstream use of asynchronous loading of data. And yet, this people were mad because the links were not real anchor elements. Go get some perspective kids.
gfodor 17y ago
A good rule of thumb: if you think a product is absolutely great until you hit "view source", you're probably missing the point.
gte910h 17y ago
Is this article a joke? Scribd's new HTML based PDF renderer is working fine. I think the author missed something.
ydant 17y ago
Well, the best part about this article is that it got me to check out Scribd. I'd been ignoring it, although I saw previous commentary about them moving from Flash to plugin-free. I'm impressed with the HTML render - it looks smooth. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.

13 points by mikecane 17y ago

Don't give me problems, give me solutions. And by me I mean scribd, not me.

lenni 17y ago

He's kinda right, a file format meant for printing fixed size pages will inevitably suffer from some impedance mismatch when automatically converting it to a relatively simple document format meant for screens. But I disagree with the claim that it isn't HTML. It sure isn't pretty but a if you define HTML as the input that the HTML parser of today's browsers can handle (rather than the HTML spec) it is perfectly fine.

mustpax 17y ago

Web applications are not the same as web pages. A web page is a document, which ought to have simple clean markup. A web application on the other hand is a tool that can edit said documents. It's more "meta." To expect the tool to have the same sort of semantic purity as the documents it interacts with is overly idealistic. It doesn't matter as much what we can systematically infer about an application, it is more important that the content be accessible in some sort of standard format. Similarly, Scribd's HTML5 viewer, is just that, a viewer. Not a full fledged PDF to HTML converter. It's primary purpose is to allow a user to experience a document in its entirety in the browser. In a world of trade-offs, and priorities, the markup of the viewer itself is near the bottom.

alexyim 17y ago
That's what I thought too. Sounds like this guy doesn't really get web apps.
baddox 17y ago
Would you really consider facebook to be a "web app"? I think facebook is, or at least should be a pretty normal web page.
- robryan 17y ago
  Far from it, amazing complexity in how certain parts of the page load and certain page changes are coming through ajax. Very much a web app, probably as complex as any web app out there.
  - baddox 17y ago
    There's no reason for so much complexity. I'm talking of course about the core of facebook, not the third-party apps. Sure, asynchronous loads of certain content is nice, but it hardly qualifies it as a "web app"? Which parts of facebook are you referring to?

gruseom 17y ago

This reads like self-parody. The author doesn't like the way their <P> tags are positioned. Could there be a more ridiculous criticism? From where I stand, Scribd's HTML5 implementation (if it turns out as good as the demo) is one of the biggest leaps forward I've seen on the web in a while, as well as one of the most impressive pivots I've seen a startup make to turn a negative into a positive. It's a huge technical challenge to do what they're doing and get it right; one of those things that seems hard to people who haven't worked on it and turns out to be far harder than it seems. There's also the minor detail that they're producing this output for an enormous class of inputs, so to nitpick the generated HTML as if it were written by hand is to miss the point colossally. Edit: on another note, it's probably a positive sign if people with this mentality don't like your work.

timdorr 17y ago

And if it were proper, semantic HTML5, what problem would that solve? I'm failing to see what benefit that has to the user. They don't need to see the markup; it just has to work.

invisible 17y ago

I think this dude needs to read the first part of Coders at Work with Jamie Zawinski (in reference to Netscape). A version 1 system RUSHED to the public that actually works and has few bugs is amazing. The fact that it's difficult to read and hard to follow can be fixed just as bugs can in due time. I think the concept of "get it done and fix it later" is better than "take forever to work on it and someone already produced." I guess that's an age-old question we all ponder though.

petercooper 17y ago
He seems to be more peeved that it was promoted with the term "HTML 5." He has a point on that, if so. Do we want to see the term diluted to mean almost anything with a valid DOCTYPE, as Web 2.0 and AJAX were? Half the things on Delicious that are tagged AJAX are just basic Javascript..
- armandososa 17y ago
  I think the problem is having the specification named "HTML5", if it has been named (as it was originally intended) "Web Applications 1.0" all this misunderstandings will go away.

Legion 17y ago

If the author can't be bothered to even pick out a couple of snippets to support his claim, I can't be bothered to pay his post any mind.

snowmaker 17y ago

Well, sure - what's he expecting? PDF is a low-level, mostly unstructured display format. Converting that to fully semantic markup that recognizes all aspects of high-level document structure is probably an AI-complete problem. For those of you not familiar with the gory details of PDF, it basically uses absolute positioning for each character. If we converted that directly into HTML it would be a disaster. So, we actually extract quite a bit of structure on top of that, recognizing spaces, lines, columns, and paragraphs, which enables us to write much cleaner HTML. Scribd (and most PDF readers) does this with heuristic algorithms that make reasonable guesses. In the future, we'd like to push those algorithms further, and extract ever more semantic markup. But this is a "nice to have" for us - mostly, people just want the documents to display correctly and load quickly. And, anyway, expecting the output of an automated converter to match what a human would write shows a basic ignorance of the state of computers and AI.

ilike 17y ago
In my opinion, web based documents should have certain level of semantic purity. Of course there will be technical difficulties to achieve it, but that is what hackers are for. Right? While you have the right to justify the lack of semantic markup in Scribd html docs, he has the right to expect a non-messy markup underneath. Calling someone's expectation "ignorance" isnt very fair.
- alextgordon 17y ago
  The author of the article is being ignorant by not understanding the basic differences between PDF and HTML before going off on a rant about it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

jasonkester 17y ago

When people start whinging about the HTML markup for your thing, you know you're on to something. Early on, we got a guy complaining loudly about how Twiddla sucked because we had put a DIV into the HEAD tag to display a loading message. Not sure exactly how it affected his user experience, but there you go. If the best criticism that people can come up with is about a piece that nobody can ever see or be affected by, you're probably doing something right.

tlrobinson 17y ago

"every major HTML5 app today is built using un read able markup" Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that applications be built using technologies and best practices designed for documents? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup. However it often absolutely does make sense to render the documents created with these applications in clean markup. That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

jdietrich 17y ago

The real lesson here? There are no awards for correctness. If the biggest and best webapps use pig-ugly HTML, the rest of us can probably stop worrying. Build it, launch it, bodge it.

petercooper 17y ago

OK, this guy is ragging on what is a good tech demo, but "HTML 5" seems to be the 2010 equivalent of saying "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" when it comes to getting early adopters to check out your stuff, and Scribd threw around the term without it being, hmm.. authentic.. (that is, HTML 5 as a concept means more than merely producing a document that would pass validation)

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

armandososa 17y ago

It's like 2004 all over again. Back then, some people were complaining that "links" on Gmail where not really links, but underlined blue paragraphs with onclick events. Remember that? This was the most advanced web application ever made, it had 100x the storage capacity of every mail provider at the time, awesome search capabilities, and the first mainstream use of asynchronous loading of data. And yet, this people were mad because the links were not real anchor elements. Go get some perspective kids.

gfodor 17y ago

A good rule of thumb: if you think a product is absolutely great until you hit "view source", you're probably missing the point.

gte910h 17y ago

Is this article a joke? Scribd's new HTML based PDF renderer is working fine. I think the author missed something.

ydant 17y ago

Well, the best part about this article is that it got me to check out Scribd. I'd been ignoring it, although I saw previous commentary about them moving from Flash to plugin-free. I'm impressed with the HTML render - it looks smooth. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.