"Betting the company"? Sounds a little dramatic. It's HTML5 not Silverlight. How much risk is there really?
Things to consider:
- What development tools will devs use?
- How long will it take devs to get up to speed on them?
- How does debugging work?
- How do you handle losing breakpoints?
- What does the new build process look like?
- How are you going to handle graceful degradation?
- How does font-end error reporting work?
- How long will it take to make the migration?
- What business metrics are you tracking to acknowledge you made the right user choice? The right technology choice?
- How soon will we see the needle move on those business metrics?
- How will this affect growth in the short term?
- Do your hardcore Flash employees want to be working in HTML5? What will you do if they don't?
Major technology shifts are a lot more complicated than just "code it and see what happens" when you have an established product and team.
I wouldn't use any of the more complex/less-supported features of HTML5 on any live site today, that's for sure.
I always thought that Flash was quite performant compared to browser-based Javascript. Can you point to any benchmarks?
I work with a hardcore Mac zealot and it's a running joke in the office that he will complain about Flash performance every single day.
The Google pdf viewer seems good enough to me. It'll be interesting to see what you can improve on that.
I do see the value for formats like .pptx where I may not have a reader, but PDF is already a "lowest common denominator" like HTML.
Sure, I like reading my PDFs with evince, but sometimes HTML is just preferrable.
Removing yet another plugin from your browser shrinks the attack surface, and as a side benefit, reduces use of one of the worst IMO bits of web tech.
I've always thought that the best solution would be for browsers to just include PDF rendering support alongside HTML. PDF is a popular enough format on the web that it should really be handled by the browser as a core feature, not by some add-on or external application. I really liked Apple's Safari for this reason (although I dumped it for Firefox because of AdBlockPlus).
Done right it would seem like perhaps some of the higher-level rendering layers of the browser could be reused, regardless of whether the underlying content was PDF or HTML. (In fact isn't this how Safari works, with Quartz?)
No offense to Scribd, but I'd like to see the need for their service go away by in-browser support for progressively-downloaded PDFs.
To me, this feels like desperation. It seems a little late to stop depending solely on Flash. Also, why not say that you're moving after you partially move? The companies I admire the most brag about distant features the least.
PDF -> Internal Representation -> Flash viewer
In principle they should only need to change to
PDF -> Internal Representation -> HTML5 viewer
That alone should make a huge different in terms of time needed.
Never having done something similar myself, I would expect the hardest part to be correctly parsing the original PDFs and dealing with the varyiaty of PDF generators out there.
Now, people who had never heard of this company are aware of them and am 100% sure their hit rate when way up high today.
We're just that amazing. ;]
In reality what you are saying is that if X happens, you waste alot of time, if !X happens then there is still no guaranteed outcome.
I don't agree that the odds are fixed, nor that it's all-or-nothing-to-the-end. For any startup, you take mortal risk as infrequently as you can; you hedge those bets as much as you can; and, since you can invest effort to change the game in reaction to the market, you work to improve your odds over time.
So in the end, I believe you present a false dichotomy. It's rarely $100MM or death, and there's never a guaranteed outcome.
1) Flash is prevalent today. No matter how much people are bashing it on HN, its widely used especially on the sites which are incredibly popular. 2) HTML5 adoption will be slow. Look at how long it to ie6 to die and you'll have an idea of how long it will take html5 to become prevalent. 3) You're taking a technology that allows you to be accessible today and trading it for a technology which will allow you to be accessible at some unknown time in the future, basically removing any barrier to entry for your competitors.
The hyperbole makes this seem worse then it is, I'm sure. You don't really have motivation to ditch your current flash implementation. You'll just put it into a "support as needed" mode.
Come on, it's great that they're ditching Flash, but if it really works on IE6 calling it "HTML5" is nothing but link/pageview-bait. The parts of HTML5 that are supported by IE6 are called HTML4 and Javascript.