

SlideShare ditches Flash for HTML5 - siddhant
http://engineering.slideshare.net/2011/09/slideshare-ditches-flash-for-html5/

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Lewisham
This is great news. After Scribd's terrible move to lock _my content_ away
behind _their_ paywall, I can now start uploading my slides to Slideshare and
get the same HTML5 loveliness.

Bye, bye, Scribd!

~~~
hello_moto
Speaking of Scribd. I didn't know they have a paywall so I decided to check
how it works and BAM, they logged me in using my Facebook account
immediately!.

I need a separate browser just for facebook.

~~~
altrego99
Just two days ago when I decided to clean up Facebook applications, I found
that I have apparently authorized Scribd to access my data 6 months ago. I
never used scribd, and I am very sure I didn't authorize it consciously -
there it was in my Facebook applications! Very strange.

~~~
kbd
I too went through my Facebook applications recently and there was a ton of
stuff in there I never intended to authorize. Using a separate browser for
Facebook sounds like a great idea.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
If you use chrome, you can use an incognito window (ctrl+shift+n). You can
also disable third-party cookies (just remember to delete current facebook
cookies). Since iOS devices block third party cookies, most sites that
wouldn't work with them enabled now do. If you use chrome, you can also
disable them from being read (in about:flags). Chrome will also show an icon
in the urlbar if a site wants to set third party cookies, so you can enable
them for specific sites (it also has the same behaviour for blocked javascript
and plugins).

The other option is to totally disable platform apps, in the privacy,
applications menu. This will mean you can never log into an external site, but
it also means that you can't have any applications. I would do it myself if I
didn't use a third-party android application, that requires a facebook app for
interaction

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bentruyman
Heh, HTML5. <http://i.v3n.us/ASQf> Guys, this is just a non-Flash version. But
I guess blasting it out there with the HTML5 logo gets a lot more attention,
at the cost of confusing non-techies about what HTML5 really is.

And trust me, this is a discussion I have ad nauseam with clients.

Regardless, I appreciate the move Slideshare.

~~~
nikcub
I wondered the other day who owns the html5 trademark and the logo. It should
only be licensed to sites that are actually html5 - same for browsers.

It shouldn't be hard to come up with some criteria for both apps and browsers
as to what is html5.

this definitely isn't, since the markup can't be parsed and made sense of as
to what the document structure is

~~~
alanh
You say “should” but I wonder “why?”

If the goal isn’t to _certify HTML5-ness_ so much as _increase buzz about
pure-web technology_ – and the W3C has, I believe, confirmed the latter to be
the goal of the badge/logo — then no one is harmed by the status quo and a
licensing scheme would be counter-productive.

~~~
noduerme
It's worse than that. The goal is to create buzz for the sake of creating
buzz... the problem with marketers is that they can only hold one or two buzz-
words in their head at a time, and to them it's all "what those crazy hip
programmers are working on in our basement, while I'm up here looking at
chicks out the window". A lot of books will be sold about HTML5 and a lot of
dumb sites will claim to be using it, and pretty soon when everyone's
incredibly annoyed by all the HTML5 junk content out there, the marketers will
realize no one actually gave a shit in the first place, find a new buzzword,
and the world will move on.

I bet if Adobe changed the name of Flash 11 tomorrow to "HTML6", the marketers
would go crazy for it. So would all the idiots who have no idea how web is
made, but come out in armies anytime HTML5 comes up.

~~~
alanh
> _I bet if Adobe changed the name of Flash 11 tomorrow to "HTML6", the
> marketers would go crazy for it._

Oh $deity, _please_ don’t suggest that to Adobe marketing.

> _So would all the idiots who have no idea how web is made, but come out in
> armies anytime HTML5 comes up._

Not sure who these supposed idiots are or where I can see them.

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jeremymcanally
Excellent. I was hoping they would eventually go this route, but it didn't
look likely (though Scribd's move in this direction was a good indicator it
would happen eventually).

I wonder how they'll fare against Speaker Deck (<http://speakerdeck.com>) once
they get up to full steam. The experience at Speaker Deck is certainly
prettier.

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SandB0x
I'm still not sure what the point of SlideShare is, especially when Chrome has
a PDF presentation mode.

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u4
Woah! It was only a few hours back i came to know about speakerdeck claiming
to be the non flash (& non sucky) alternative to slideshare. And now this.
Giant move!

Now if only slideshare cleans up its UI/X a bit, I might never leave.

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janogonzalez
Just after the launch of SpeakerDeck(<http://speakerdeck.com/>)...

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jswinghammer
This is a lot easier if you don't support PowerPoint animations. A few years
ago I used to work on a competing product and we did support PowerPoint
animations. I thought about how to support animations in HTML and JavaScript
quite a bit and it just became obvious that doing it in Flash was far easier.

~~~
nkassis
Could you list some of the issues you had a few years ago? I'd like to know if
there now solutions to your problems or if you'd still have issues.

~~~
kreek
Can't speak for PowerPoint, but my company does print to web to print again
and our issues with HTML were always how precise it was in terms of rendering
text and graphics:

Font rendering: With flash you can embed fonts and have them render pixel
perfect across browsers. Now with WOFF fonts (see google fonts, font squirrel,
typekit) and CSS3 you can pretty reliably embed custom fonts in HTML.

Graphics: Flash was first of all a vector animation tool so this was its
strong suit for many years. Now you can use libs like raphealjs, d3js, and
fabricjs to render vectors with svg/vml or canvas.

I'll note that SVG could do much of this years ago, however IE not supporting
it until IE9 pretty much killed its progress. If SVG fixed multiline text (it
uses tspans to break up lines), I think it would be a better solution than
canvas for rendering graphics and rich documents in the browser.

~~~
smackay
Flash also has text spans for displaying blocks of text. It is not too hard to
figure out the line-breaking if you were doing the rendering on the server -
Java fonts and other text related code gives a pretty decent approximation to
what the Flash Player does. However Flash's text fields which does the
wrapping for you and has rudimentary HTML support is a lot easier to use.

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esdweb
This article could be the press release (or footnotes to it) that Jobs never
wrote or would write. What I mean is, when Steve Jobs announced a couple of
years ago that Apple would go HTML5 instead of Flash, there was great oohing
and ahhing but no concise explanation for those of us lesser mortals as to why
HTML5 is the better path. And this article does it in a couple of hundred
words.Specifically: 1) From iPhone to desktop, it's one and the same document;
2) Document files are smaller and load faster; 3) SEMANTIC WEB accessible. Our
poor semantic web, so visionary and so non-starter. Perhaps the growth of
HTML5 will save it.

~~~
revscat
Actually, Jobs did write in some detail on this very subject:

<http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/>

He specifically mentioned the same points you brought up, plus a few others.

~~~
wh-uws
Thanks for sharing that. I had heard it summarized before but don't know how i
missed that whole thing.

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kreek
Wow, nice work. As someone making the same transition for a large Flash app I
can attest to how hard this is, especially for accurate font rendering. I've
seen a lot of comments on HN along the lines of Flash sucks why don't you use
HTML5 _? As the post points out it's not a trivial switch, canvas is extremely
low level compared to Flash's Display List.

_ edit: HTML5 = abs positioned divs and CSS3 fonts in this case, plus some
text rendered as part of background images, still it's really difficult to go
from PDF to HTML no matter how you do it :)

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phzbOx
When Apple announced that they didn't want flash on their i(pod|pad|phone), I
instantly knew I'd see this in the forthcoming months:

    
    
      1) The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, 
           Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers."
    

That was such a huge move from them. I couldn't imagine another _big_ company
than Apple to do that.

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ksri
I like the section on Error Handling. They do image comparison to confirm the
page looks good. Does anybody know any open source library that would do this?
I had tried a naive approach for something similar, and had failed miserably.

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danw
Does that include putting hideous adverts across the slides in 'HTML5'?

(I miss the early scribd & slideshare, before they started trying to make
money to survive by plastering the place with adverts)

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__mark
I have been using latex with beamer for the last year, I don't do many
presentations, but really it helps with staying on message that you have to be
able to so it in latex.

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BlueZeniX
30% faster, because it's a rewrite?

SWF is a very compact format and text rendering is optimized for speed
(animation). I doubt their flash viewer was built on decent code...

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pornel
They did a bit more ambitious version: they're using CSS fonts and absolutely
position _every single letter_ to preserve original text layout in HTML.

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mattmanser
Are fonts working for anyone else? As they're all pixellated horribleness for
me now. They look especially bad in their demo. Probably just a small bug.

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kosso
They're still using the Flash version in the embeddable/oEmbed-discoverable
version.

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kapilmohan
SlideShare 30% faster and flash free! Do they get carbon credits for this?

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gto16108
An HTML5 driven mobile SlideShare is great news right now :)

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kcmani
w00t, finally its here.

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drivebyacct2
Good god, finally. I'm no fan of Flash, but I'm not sure I've ever had a
SlideShare presentation load properly and for what ever reason, people love to
use them exclusively and I'm never able to get to the content in an
alternative fashion.

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n9986
Yippie :D

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sylvainkalache
SlideShare faster, lighter!

