Wow! At first I thought Adobe had jumped into the browser market. That would be interesting.
They might. They have been contributing to WebKit.
Adobe & HTML
61–70 of 71 posts
Re: Adobe & HTML
#62Anybody got a useful example of reflowable text? On my large screen, a lot the boxes are just empty.
I'd suggest resizing the window.
Re: Adobe & HTML
#63Anyone 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…
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.
Re: Adobe & HTML
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to easily create stunning experience I know that I've lost this battle and that I'm in a minority, but to me "stunning experience" comes from the content, and not the presentation.
Really? I'm really really struggling to find any human experience that is not improved by the "presentation". Can you name a single one that is wholly about the content and derives no value from the 'presentation'? (For any of the 5 senses?). To my mind there is basic quadrant setup: * Low Content and Low Presentation == Worthless Junk * Low Content and High Presentation == Useless Fluff, Polished Turds * High Conten…
Isn't HN itself an example of your 'high content, low presentation' category?
Re: Adobe & HTML
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who has ever had the book of someone with no design background in their hands will be able to testify that there is a huge difference between books done by a professional typesetter and an amateur (if that amateur isn't self-taught and doesn't otherwise care about design). I've read books double spaced with monospaced fonts on shitty LCD monitors - I was able to ignore the terrible presentation because the c…
I don't really get you then. You seem to claim that design is important but at the same time deny it. I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.
What? It's really simple. The most important thing, to me, is excellent content. Good design will help excellent content, but excellent content is still great even if it has poor design.
Great design does not help shoddy content.
If an aspiring author asks me for advice do I tell them to work on the plotting and characters? Or do I suggest some bike-shedding around nice fonts and paragraph indentation styles?
Re: Adobe & HTML
#66Anyone 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…
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 finis…
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.
Re: Adobe & HTML
#67Re: Adobe & HTML
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 finis…
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 L…
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/...
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...
Re: Adobe & HTML
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really get you then. You seem to claim that design is important but at the same time deny it. I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.
What? It's really simple. The most important thing, to me, is excellent content. Good design will help excellent content, but excellent content is still great even if it has poor design. Great design does not help shoddy content. If an aspiring author asks me for advice do I tell them to work on the plotting and characters? Or do I suggest some bike-shedding around nice fonts and paragraph indentation styles?
Uhm, as a rule, authors should do none of those things. (I will make an exception for Douglas R. Hofstadter. If you want a book where presentation is interwoven with content and you can't really separate one from the other you have to read Gödel Escher Bach. In general, though, it’s safe to say that most authors are not Douglas R. Hofstadter. Gödel Escher Bach is also one of those books that’s hard to make into an ebook – and hasn’t been for that reason – because web technologies are lagging behind the printed book so badly.) They need experts to do that.
I’m not suggesting that authors start bikeshedding. I want professionals to do their profession. Authors are rarely good designers.
Re: Adobe & HTML
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Designing for this medium means that you must take your canonical ideal and figure out how it would be transformed under different stresses: But the medium lets you account for this with style sheets. You can have a totally different layout for mobile, etc.
This is half true; you still can't achieve exact output even with CSS (try viewing even very large sites with FF vs Chrome, they won't be identical to the pixel). Media queries also let you adapt to devices/monitors, but realistically you can only cover the largest 5 or six cases. At some point you're going to get user who's on some crazy screen resolution with a sideways monitor, or a strange tablet, and you'll have…
Total control is an optical illusion. Even with books you'll have printing defects, bad lighting in readers room, coffee cup rounds, and so on. A solid design is the one that can survive in worst environment. It do not have to be pretty, pretty is optional and often not really desirable (Mona Lisa is not pretty is she?)