Thoughts on Scribd's move to HTML5

I posted this on the site, but figured it might be of interest here as well:

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Trevor,

Thanks for the thoughtful post. You captured some of the interesting aspects and obstacles we had to overcome in order to realize the HTML based viewer. I'd like to add some commentary on the points you bring up:

- Performance: I'm quite excited about the range of possibilities we have in improving the performance of the new viewer. It's something we discuss endlessly, and it will just be a matter of time before we can implement some more of the ideas we have tossed around.

- Text Selection: We lose some control on this by handing it all over to the browser; which I like. I see what you mean by Acrobat Reader being the gold standard, but the reality of the range of document types we get means that there is no definite standard of behavior therein. That said, I would love to hear some suggestions for creative/usable spins we could put on this.

- Search: Another one that us engineers are immensely excited about. We have so much flexibility. While there are technical challenges, the user experience surrounding the search functionality we have planned should be very impressive.

- Printing: I haven't personally put much thought into the browser based printing, but it should be a simple step with what we already have (as you said). As for flash based printing, I don't know the details, but one of our engineers apparently did some great work on this recently. If you want more details, I can see about putting you in contact with him.

Thanks again for the thoughts. This is an exciting time for these technologies and document presentation.

-Quin

Wow! I came to the article expecting a lot of mindless bashing from the flash camp, but this turned out a thoughtful article.

I don't care that much about text selection, but resolving hyphenation on copy sounds like a must-have feature for me.

Very good observations. The feedback will help us.