Adobe & HTML

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.<p>I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially when building <a href="http://dustincurtis.com" rel="nofollow">http://dustincurtis.com</a>, 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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Note that this really only has to do with the <i>layout</i> 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.

Anyone else noticed that this move comes a week shy of the two-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's infamous open letter? (<a href="http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/</a>)<p>"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."<p>Write-up here: <a href="http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with-standards-focused-portal-42104.html" rel="nofollow">http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with-standard...</a>

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.<p><a href="https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF71kH" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF7...</a>

On the Tools and Services page, this piqued my interest:<p>&#62; Code<p>&#62; 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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