Re:Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess
by tlrobinson on Saturday May 15, 2010 @01:52PM
(#1350308)
"every major HTML5 app today is built using un read able markup"
Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that applications be built using technologies and best practices designed for documents? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup.
However it often absolutely does make sense to render the documents created with these applications in clean markup.
That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that applications be built using technologies and best practices designed for documents? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup.
However it often absolutely does make sense to render the documents created with these applications in clean markup.
That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.