

Reversing course, Google rejects Adobe Web publishing tech - sciwiz
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57617840-93/reversing-course-google-rejects-adobe-web-publishing-tech/

======
leoc
Ah yes, the Open Web, brought to you by MS, Google, Apple, Mozilla, and
Op^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H. Remember, if there's anything you don't like about their
decisions, you can change things just by starting your own web brower and
getting your first hundred million users.

~~~
wycats
I hate to agree with this troll, but I don't see how to disagree :(

~~~
leoc
Thanks—though I'm not a troll. Here's a longer discussion of the problem and
what could be done about it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259)
.

A more straightforward response would just be to call for HTML to be brought
back under the control of the W3C. There are certainly merits to that, but at
the same time a) W3C has its own obvious flaws as the overlord of HTML, b) no
matter how benevolent a dictator W3C would or could be, even democratic (or
quasi-semi-democratic) control is not the same thing as actual openness in the
form of _de facto_ (not just notional) forkability, and c) there's no easy and
obvious way to get the yoke of W3C control back on the necks of the browser-
vendor cartel, no matter how desirable it might be.

Regardless, one important first step is for people in general to have a clear-
eyed view of what the present situation really is. One necessary part of that
is for people to stop having a reflexive feel-good response to the 'Open Web'
slogan.

------
ch0wn
I highly recommend reading the original thread instead of this horrible
writeup:
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-
dev/kTktlHPJn4Q)

Especially Håkon Wium Lie, who isn't even mentioned in this article, brings up
some really convincing points against CSS Regions.

------
frik
I would say the reason is Google Docs! The current version doesn't use
contentEditable [0] anymore, Google wrote a custom renderer in JS using one
DIV per line with custom word wrapping, etc.

With Adobe's CSS Regions and other improvements [1] everyone could write an
Google Docs competitor (single person mode) in one hour. Of course, Google and
Microsoft with its Office Web fear this possible upcoming situation.

It would be awesome if some browser devs improve "contentEditable". It's
really sad, there are so many bugs in Webkit and Firefox bugtrackers and got
submitted related to this topic and no one fixed them. And no new features
arrive either for years. Read some source code TinyMCE & co and you know what
I mean, a lot of hacks to work around browser bugs.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich-
text_editor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich-text_editor)

[1] [http://html.adobe.com/webplatform/](http://html.adobe.com/webplatform/)

~~~
afsina
Did you actually read the actual conversation?
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-d...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-
dev/kTktlHPJn4Q/YrnfLxeMO7IJ)

~~~
frik
Yes. The Google Groups discussion made it clear that Blink devs are not
interested in Adobe's patches for several reasons. And the real reason seems
be more political (Google Docs interests) than anything else.

What's weird is that even Microsoft IE10+ and Apple iOS 7 support CSS regions!
And Chrome (and Opera Next) want even remove multi-column support, or at least
fall back to a inferior bugg solution, wtf.

What I don't get that Mozilla proposed their own inferior solution. It's
reminds me of Mozilla's movement against WebSQL, a very sad story for HTML5.

------
nilsbunger
This should be handled by the web-standards committee. Yes it's slow-moving,
but solutions that only work in one browser will balkanize the web.

If I were Adobe I'd try to build a javascript-based solution for now, and push
on the standards committees for the long term.

------
dictum
"1.4 How does this affect web standards?

We have sufficient market share on the desktop that a few months from now, we
will be in a position to unilaterally dictate them.

We hope to leverage this control to achieve the same dominance in mobile
eventually."

—

"In practice, this allows us to call the project "open" while simultaneously
ensuring Google will be the only effective contributor to the Chrome and Blink
source now and in the future. We've had enormous success co-opting the
language of open source in the past to imply our products are better, and we
aim to continue with that strategy."

[http://prng.net/blink-faq.html](http://prng.net/blink-faq.html)

------
rcsorensen
Dear Google, other things you might want to do to make your rendering engine
faster, especially on mobile.

* Proxy all mobile connections through an html-simplifier

* Ignore inline elements like <strong> and <em>

* Remove the vertical part of the box model, and disallow any vertical positioning statements

* Simply serve raw html to the end user. In these days of semantic HTML5, users should be able to read it anyway.

------
hardboiled
CSS Regions considered harmful: [http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-
considered-harmf...](http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-
harmful)

By Håkon Wium Lie,the father of CSS, the CTO of Opera, and a pioneer advocate
for web standards

------
kevingadd
Short-sighted. Chrome's original performance push didn't come at the expense
of web platform features and that's part of why it was able to supplant
existing browsers.

Any claims that this will improve performance in the long-term are misguided:
These kinds of layout features are necessary, so stripping them from the core
(especially when other browsers are implementing them) will result in a nasty
mix of browser-specific pages and low-performance javascript shims.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Chrome's original performance push didn't come at the expense of web
> platform features

What evidence is there that it did not come at the expense of Google support
for any proposed Web Platform features that Google could not efficiently
implement?

~~~
checker659
The evidence is the feature-full browser that was Chrome (?)

~~~
dragonwriter
> The evidence is the feature-full browser that was Chrome

Which has good support for what were already web standards, and good support
for what became web standards through, among other things, Google's support,
but you haven't yet provided any evidence that, in choosing which proposed new
standards to support, Google was at all reluctant to oppose any that would
have conflicted with the optimization work it was doing.

(Given how bad the performance state of the web was, then, it may be the case
that the proposed web standards at the time wouldn't have conflcited _at all_
with the kinds of optimizations that were on the table -- which still doesn't
show the claimed change in attitude vis-a-vis optimization and web standards,
just as change in environment.)

------
morkbot
Would be great if instead they would implement CSS Books "standard"
[http://books.spec.whatwg.org/](http://books.spec.whatwg.org/)

