

Adobe & HTML - v33ra
http://html.adobe.com/

======
dcurtis
If you're not a designer, it might be hard to see, but the importance of this
work is impossible to overstate. In 10 years, we'll look back on today and
think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable
text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web.

I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially
when building <http://dustincurtis.com>, and what happened surprised me: after
a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to
fit within the limitations of the display technology. As I realized that the
only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every
paragraph, I slowly stopped writing and designing the articles. It was just
too much work because the tools to do great custom layouts on the web just
don't exist.

Compared to what should be possible by now, CSS is pretty primitive. It's a
limiting factor in the digitization of traditional media, like magazines. What
Adobe is doing here is awesome, and I commend them for pushing forward the
status quo.

~~~
gbog
> the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position
> every paragraph

To me, this looks like the most INsane way to build a layout. What is wrong
with a "let browsers and users choose their font size, their text widht,
etc."?

For instance, both my wife and I are Kindle users, we have different font
size, the text reflows almost always correctly, and who prefers bigger font
has bigger font. My father is also a Kindle user and use an even bigger font
because of his age. Soon he will have to read book on this device, because all
fixed-font books will be too small for him.

~~~
EmilStenstrom
There are two big "design movements" on the web, and dustin represents one end
of the spectrum. His side argues that great design makes things better, and
that we all should put more time into design.

The other side says "design is not needed", and that each user can manage
their design settings themselves. These are the people that pushed for RSS and
Responsive design, and that see design as more of an optional addon.

None of the sides are always correct.

~~~
idan
This is a terrible representation of the issue.

In the end, designing for the web is designing for a lack of control. I can't
control your screen geometry, display technology, browser compliance, fonts,
and more. There is no fixed canvas like I had in print.

This isn't a limitation, this is simply the medium. Designing for this medium
means that you must take your canonical ideal and figure out how it would be
transformed under different stresses: tiny screens with partial user
attention, big screens viewed from couch distance, monochrome screens which
don't refresh quickly, modern browsers with fast javascript, and old broken
browsers.

Great design does make things better, but it isn't about pushing the design
decisions onto the user. There's no argument that Dustin produces beautiful
works of art, but designing with manual layout of the kind he describes is
designing against the grain of the medium. CSS has limitations, but so does
print. Design is what you accomplish within those limitations, and how you go
about accomplishing it in a timeframe that allows you to complete your project
and make a living.

~~~
primigenus
I read this, thought "gee, this guy gets it", then clicked on your profile and
saw "developer/designer hybrid unicorn".

From my experience, it's mainly such hybrids that have this perspective on
designing for the web. It makes it hard to work with people who don't see it
the same way - either designers like Dustin or developers who don't fully
appreciate the value of design.

~~~
procload
Wait, are you arguing that the "developer/designer hybrid unicorn" isn't a
worthwhile pursuit? I think it's these people who are the ones pushing things
forward by experimenting with their designs and trying to think of new ways to
approach designing for the web.

~~~
primigenus
No, I was arguing in favour of them. I'm one myself. :-)

------
crazygringo
This may be off-topic, but progress with CSS (flowable text, etc.) is not only
glacially slow, but we're still stuck with the terribly-designed CSS standard.

I find myself wishing for some kind of "layout bytecode" -- basically,
machine-readable instructions which would size every element in a browser's
page using custom layout algorithms that would depend on the size of the page
and the size of font glyphs.

CSS would be compiled into this bytecode, but we'd be open to inventing new
and better style languages which could be compiled as well. So we could create
layout languages based on columns instead of floats, for example.

If this were actually implemented in newer browsers, it could actually be
emulated in older browsers using JS libraries (although it would be much
slower).

Note that this really only has to do with the _layout_ properties of CSS.
Things like color, rounded corners, drop shadows -- all that would still be
implemented traditionally, but these aren't generally what people have
problems with. It's the terrible layout algorithms of CSS which generate
endless headaches.

------
marathe
Anyone else noticed that this move comes a week shy of the two-year
anniversary of Steve Jobs's infamous open letter?
(<http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/>)

"New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on
mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating
great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving
the past behind."

Write-up here: [http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with-
standard...](http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with-standards-
focused-portal-42104.html)

~~~
donteflon
Let's leave the Steve Jobs PR bullshit out of this. When it comes to Web
Standards, Adobe was on the bandwagon before Apple even knew such a thing
existed. For example, before any browser had support for SVG, Adobe
Illustrator could export SVGs, and Adobe wrote and distributed for free a
plugin that made SVG available in all the major browsers (IE, Mozilla, Opera
and Safari). After it acquired Macromedia, Adobe finished and made open source
the first VM with a JIT for ECMA script and donated it to Mozilla, it also
licensed Opera's HTML/CSS rendering engine (by far the most standards
compliant at the time, KHTML/WebKit was not around) and put it into
Dreamweaver. Most of Adobe's products use JavaScript as the default scripting
engine since a long long time ago (close to a decade by now), and it goes on,
and on. Yet in the Steve Jobs distortion field, it's actually good ol' Apple
who are twisting Adobe's hand to join the Web Standards movement. Hilarious,
especially since it's the same Apple who had for years an obsolete,
nonconforming, slow browser that was dead last in performance and
implementation of Web Standards, so much so that Zeldman, in his "Designing
with Web Standards" recommends IE 5 for Mac over Safari. Imagine that, for
years (until Apple forked KHTML and KJS from KDE), the best browser running on
Macs was made by Microsoft.

~~~
mturmon
I don't seen the point of the venom in your reply.

In fact, the Jobs letter that the grandfather comment mentions, recognized
Adobe's historical contributions to publishing and graphics.

Here are its first sentences:

"Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders
when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer,
adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple
invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two
companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were
many good times."

You may disagree with Jobs' conclusions, or dislike Apple for various reasons,
but the letter shows considerable insight.

~~~
donteflon
The entire letter is typical of the Jobs rhetoric, a web of lies, omissions
and half-truths and I fail to notice any insight at all. Sure, in the opening
paragraph, Jobs tries to pretend he doesn't loathe Adobe [1], but in the rest
of it it makes sure to push the idea that Apple is some sort of white knight
of open standards fighting the good fight against the visionless Adobe who
still doesn't get this thing called Web Standards. For example he writes

"HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which
Apple is a member."

Notice it doesn't even mention that Adobe is also a member of the standards
committee just like Apple? Or how about this gem:

"Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with
a small open source project and created WebKit [bla bla bla] Apple has set the
standard for mobile web browsers."

You may not know it, but KHTML was pretty competitive, shipping with
Konqueror, the default web browser in KDE, and it also had a lot of users
including Nokia before Apple forked it and started to add their own code to
it, a lot of the times Mac specific and non portable. It also fails to mention
that Apple's own contribution to WebKit is far lower than that of KDE's
developers, authors of the original codebase and later additions to WebCore
like KSVG2, KCanvas, KDOM [2], or Google, the current largest contributor.
It's pretty deceiving to claim that Apple just took a "small open source
project" and gave WebKit to Google, Nokia, Adobe (they use and contribute to
WebKit also) etc to use, and it's extremely deceiving considering the bad
blood between KDE developers and Apple caused by the way Apple forked KHTML
and managed their fork originally ([3] for an episode of that open source
drama).

Anyway, this letter is just an episode in a long and entertaining grudge match
between Jobs and Adobe, dating back to the days when Apple's own survival in
the holy war against PC\Microsoft depended on Adobe's commitment to support
MacOS, which was apparently not enthusiastic enough by Jobs' standards.

[1] Via a review for the recently released Final Cut Pro X, I found this old
article about the origins of Final Cut, where Jobs claims

"But a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a
Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. "They
said flat-out no," Jobs recalls. "We were shocked, because they had been a big
supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, 'Okay, if nobody wants to
help us, we're just going to have to do this ourselves.' "

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/02/21/8251769/index.htm)

Poor little Apple left to dry by the evil Adobe. Just look at the Wikipedia
entry for Adobe Premiere to find out that outside the Jobs distortion field
the software was released on Macs from day 1, in fact it was exclusive to Mac
for the first versions. By version 3, a less advanced port to Windows is
released, and the Mac version continues to be far ahead until... (surprise)
1998 when Mac and Windows versions reach parity and begin being released at
the same time. It sure looks like Apple is trying to punish Adobe for giving
the Windows peons access to software that was exclusive to Macs until then.

[2] [http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/07/10/199244/apple-to-
adop...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/07/10/199244/apple-to-adopt-
kde4s-kdom-and-ksvg2)

[3] <http://blogs.kde.org/node/1049>

------
haberman
I'm very cross with Adobe for forcing me to install Adobe Reader today. Makes
it hard for me to have any interest in their new ideas.

[https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF7...](https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF71kH)

~~~
aw3c2
Reply to the sender that this is not acceptable.

------
RossM
On the Tools and Services page, this piqued my interest:

> Code

> We think there’s a need for a different type of code editor – we’re working
> on something and will have more to share soon.

~~~
pdenya
Same, but I've never used an adobe product thats fast, responsive, and made
for power users. I don't want another editor that's trying to hold my hand
like dreamweaver.

~~~
prawn
Not originally Adobe, but Homesite?

Bit embarrassing, but I actually still use Allaire's Cold Fusion Studio from
1999. I think that was, at the time, the big brother to Homesite.

~~~
smhinsey
Homesite was the first thing I thought of, which was definitely one of those
trips down memory lane that leaves you thinking "wow, that was how long ago?!"

------
tommi
Sad how the samples don't have any working fallback but break hideously on
Chrome 19.

~~~
Zr40
They're working fine for me in Chrome 18 and Webkit nightly, though not in
Safari 5.1.5.

~~~
tommi
Yes, but are you using the experimental --enable-css-regions switch?

~~~
ryannielsen
If it's experimental, I don't think either Adobe or Google can be blamed for
the fact they don't work. Naturally the css doesn't degrade – the browser is
advertising support for a feature that's currently _broken_ in the browser and
thus _disabled by default_.

~~~
tommi
I was asking if the parent was using the experimental feature and wondering if
it worked for him because of it. I am not using the experimental feature.

Of course samples are only samples, but they would be better if they showed a
real life scenario where you have to make it work for the current generation
of browsers and the upcoming generation. You don't have to degrade it with
CSS, just make it work somehow.

------
sparknlaunch12
They lost on flash. Will they lose on html and CSS?

~~~
qxcv
They did not "lose" on Flash. 99% market penetration[0] is not losing. I doubt
they'll "lose" on HTML and CSS any more than they lost on Dreamweaver, they'll
simply pull an Autodesk[1] and target the education and training market. It's
hard to beat the Flash IDE for ease-of-use, and I imagine their new HTML-based
product(s) will be the same.

[0]:
[https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplatformruntimes/statist...](https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplatformruntimes/statistics.html)
[1]: <http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center>

~~~
lloeki
> 99% market penetration

By that metric, Java has 73%, but I basically never encounter a Java applet on
the web (except when digitally signing my taxes) and increasingly hardly any
Flash.

------
thirdsun
I hope this will be relevant for Adobe's Digital Magazine Distribution Suite -
I'm really tired of waiting for new New Yorker issues to download on my
ancient 1 MBit connection (rural area in germany). There's no need to provide
text as a bunch of huge images resulting in several 100 MBytes in size.

------
chris_wot
Doesn't this work on Firefox? It has Canary, IE10 developer preview, Chrome
and Webkit builds... no Mozilla!

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Gecko seems to be behind on a lot of things lately... it took until FF11 for
them to support the loop attribute on audio tags(!)

------
james4k
Wow! At first I thought Adobe had jumped into the browser market. That would
be interesting.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
They might. They have been contributing to WebKit.

------
alexchamberlain
Anybody got a useful example of reflowable text? On my large screen, a lot the
boxes are just empty.

~~~
cfqycwz
I'd suggest resizing the window.

~~~
alexchamberlain
I did to see the example work, but my point was that by default this gives a
bad UX.

------
salmanapk
Already seen few sites abusing CSS Regions and making paragraphs harder to
read. PLEASE use them wisely.

