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Adobe & HTML

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Re: Adobe & HTML

#51

Post by rimantas »

qxcv wrote: post #12
sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #8

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

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... [1]: ht…

  >  99% market penetration[0] is not losing.
Let's talk about trends: what is the outlook for web browsing on smartphones and tablets? How big part of these support Flash? What part of those supporting flash actually have it enabled?

IE had 98% marketshare once too…

Re: Adobe & HTML

#52

Post by rimantas »

DanBC wrote: post #41
whatusername wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Books. Books don't need sound and video and special effects and gradients and rounded corners and 8 different fonts and mouse-over effects and transitions and etc. You get one font for 40,000 words. You get justification, and paragraphs, and if you're lucky a nice font. An online example would be "Readbility" - that turns weirdly presented text into a very simple presentation. I accept that it's a carefully chosen we…

  > Books
Tufte, Knuth, do those names say anything to you?

  > very simple presentation
A lot of work goes into producing very simple and efficient presentation. It is much harder than to produce crowded mess.

"Good design is invisible". Not to be taken literally, but there is much wisdom in these words.

Re: Adobe & HTML

#53

Post by secoif »

DanBC wrote: post #41
whatusername wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Books. Books don't need sound and video and special effects and gradients and rounded corners and 8 different fonts and mouse-over effects and transitions and etc. You get one font for 40,000 words. You get justification, and paragraphs, and if you're lucky a nice font. An online example would be "Readbility" - that turns weirdly presented text into a very simple presentation. I accept that it's a carefully chosen we…

Readability is good exactly because of well executed "design".

Re: Adobe & HTML

#54

Post by procload »

primigenus wrote: post #50
idan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transf…

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.

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.

Re: Adobe & HTML

#55

Post by hej »

DanBC wrote: post #49
hej wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have seriously misunderstood what great presentation is and you are selling books way short. Good presentation is only about rounded corners if those rounded corners are actually an improvement. If they distract they are bad presentation. There are good and bad ways to present text in books and this is not some subtle improvement, this is noticeable. Typesetting books is seriously hard and there are tons…

> 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.

Re: Adobe & HTML

#56

Post by showerst »

danssig wrote: post #38
idan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transf…

>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 to sacrifice total control. 'Nature of the beast.

Re: Adobe & HTML

#57

Post by 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.

Re: Adobe & HTML

#60

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

chris_wot wrote: post #14

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

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(!)
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