Adobe's John Nack: Adobe is "sabotaging" HTML5?

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-8.txt

Skimming around this thing is pretty interesting. They recommend plugging sewage systems by flushing sponges down toilets. And here is part of how they recommend setting fire to a factory:

To make another type of simple fuse, soak one end of a piece of string in grease. Rub a generous pinch of gunpowder over the inch of string where greasy string meets clean string. Then ignite the clean end of the string. It will burn slowly without a flame (in much the same way that a cigarette burns) until it reaches the grease and gunpowder; it will then flare up suddenly.

Sounds pretty authentic to me. Which makes the original quote all the greater. It opens a new possible explanation for the inefficiency of large companies, too: they're full of saboteurs!

What you did was to post an almost-ad-hominen attack, calling names such as "total ignorance/laziness", lack of "due diligence". Your only 'content' is quotes from 2 blogs that says Adobe is a nice kid without telling the details about what happened, what the w3c emails said.

When Hixie says "blocked by Adobe", you better come up with better arguments than "these 2 guys I've selected myself says that Adobe is a nice kid". If anybody knows anything about html5, it is Hixie. He has done an incredible job getting html5 forward, and he has fully earned his respect. http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1265967771&count=1

And you would have pointed out, that Adobe would from now on take a back seat and not veto the canvas and other new html5 features as Adobe isn't a browser vendor.

I came to the conclusion that Larry Masinter from Adobe did issue a formal objection to the public list - this is quite obvious from this post: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Feb/0002...

However, there was then further communication that took place in a private, members-only list, where apparently this objection was handled.

What seems to be happening is either Adobe is innocently handling the process of raising objections incorrectly, by posting them in a public list, then withdrawing them privately later on, or Adobe is maliciously attempting to subvert the process through delaying tactics.

I encourage you to read the thread and decide for yourself if Adobe is really innocent or is deliberately delaying. In considering such things, I usually like to look at what the parties have to gain/lose, as well as their actions.

'Adobe will modify existing tools, or create new tools that allow content creators to do 2D and 3D drawing, and/or video, using Canvas and HTML Video, with the output not relying on Adobe Flash technologies '

or:

'Adobe will not modify existing tools, or create new tools that output to Canvas and HTML Video'

Either answer shows whether they're committed to a rich web with these features built in as standard.

If they can't optimize any better than that, how are they ever going to see success on mobile devices?

Some things may be said in private mailing lists, face to face conversation, phone calls, IM etc. but the actual standards, the objections and the decision making process is all public.

http://twitter.com/diveintomark

I don't think this one can be untangled by deferring to experts - at least not yet. There's still not enough information.

Personally, I think the whole thing reeks of stupid standards-committee politics from all sides. Adobe, judging from what they've posted publicly, decided to play up technicalities and procedural issues to try to kill or hold up a competitor to Flash, and the WG chairs responded by publicly alluding to private discussions and painting it to look as bad as possible.

Larry Masinter is also a veteran of web standards. He seems to be the sort of person who thinks that standards purity, procedural issues, and the like are more important than actual, real world, shipping, interoperable implementations. "<masinter> well, I'm not sure 'matches reality' is always the most important goal" from http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090922

So, I do not know if he is trying to slow down the HTML5 standards process because he is employed by Adobe and they consider it in their best interest to slow the process down, or if it's merely because he's an architecture astronaut standards wonk who truly believes that objections claiming that canvas is out of scope of the HTML working group and that it would be better served by splitting it off into some other (currently unspecified) committee. I will note that the W3C HTML working group was chartered with canvas present in the working draft it adopted from the WHATWG, and the only reason it is being split into a separate specification is because of more procedural objections from the very same parties who seem to be opposing any innovation that came from the WHATWG and browser vendors.

First, it was against Apple - "Without Flash, the iPad will suck. Apple is evil for excluding it". Now, the pendulum has swung the other way - "Adobe is evil".

Eventually we'll settle on the agreed upon: Adobe is only mildly evil. :)

The war is being waged mostly by the fanboy contingent

If you look at it in the sense that some browsers support it and others will likely follow, no, it doesn't matter.

If you look at it like IE6 supported CSS, it won't matter tomorrow, but in a few years when everyone has to hack their site to pieces just to give a box a rounded corner that looks the same in every browser.... well, it will matter then.

So are you talking about all of them or just some? How did you get to that conclusion?

There is plenty of things that they don't do very well but that can be said about more or less anyone else out there can't it?

In general as a user of their Masters Collection I am pretty satisfied with how they allow my workflows to be optimized across the line.

That's what adobe is in the business of helping me with.