Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthiaskramm | Hacker News Reader

custom fonts, for starters :)

Anything else besides custom fonts? Unless there's a subset of html5 features that I'm completely unaware of, I don't see how html5 brings anything useful to a text viewing app like scribd that wasn't already possible before...

text rotation, shadow or indenting, etc. Lots of good 'print' looking stuff that was done with images or in flash before. Now Scribd gets to do it in straight html making it easier to index as well (I know flash in indexable, but I'm pretty sure there is a preference to text).

True, but not convinced enough people care about custom fonts over rendering an image. It ends up being pretty much the same experience for them. (Actually custom fonts may well load slower for users, so it's a worse experience in some ways).

But Google can't crawl images...

Google already crawls the original .pdf files. I'm not sure we need every conversion of a pdf file indexed as well.

But how else will people find their way to Scribd's site to click the ads?

You're seriously so pissy about scribd that you're currently objecting to their using standard html instead of images? Get a life.

I'm trying to figure out why they're bothering to solve something that's already been solved pretty well.

eg:

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://infolab.stanford.edu...

Users won't see any difference, or care.

I do think scribd up to now has been pretty bad for the web, locking plain text documents and images up in their walled garden. Maybe they can change that, but what value can they actually add? What problem are they solving?

And of course, you know that users won't see any difference or care, despite never having seen, let alone used it. Just because you think the problem has been solved well enough, doesn't mean everyone does. After all, who needs a refrigerator when you have an ice box?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com