Adobe & HTML
html.adobe.com
html.adobe.com
I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially when building http://dustincurtis.com, and what happened surprised me: after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. As I realized that the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph, I slowly stopped writing and designing the articles. It was just too much work because the tools to do great custom layouts on the web just don't exist.
Compared to what should be possible by now, CSS is pretty primitive. It's a limiting factor in the digitization of traditional media, like magazines. What Adobe is doing here is awesome, and I commend them for pushing forward the status quo.
I know that I've lost this battle and that I'm in a minority, but to me "stunning experience" comes from the content, and not the presentation.
It's much like code, no one cares what your backend looks like, if users can't work with your apps.
To my mind there is basic quadrant setup:
* Low Content and Low Presentation == Worthless Junk
* Low Content and High Presentation == Useless Fluff, Polished Turds
* High Content and Low Presentation == Useful but Boring and hard to understand
* High Content and High Presentation == Life Changing Content. Valuable AND easy to grok.
An online example would be "Readbility" - that turns weirdly presented text into a very simple presentation.
I accept that it's a carefully chosen well designed presentation, but the simplicity is key to allowing access to the information.
See also all the various HN redesigns. HN is presentationally fairly simple. Almost all the redesigns add more stuff, but decrease usability, and distract from the actual content.
> That's "Presentation" that clearly adds value to the content.
I'm not saying presentation is pointless. But, if we're doing either / or, would you rather have bug free code with no indentation or buggy code with lovely formatting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold
http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St...
There are good and bad ways to present text in books and this is not some subtle improvement, this is noticeable. Typesetting books is seriously hard and there are tons of pitfalls, even if all you need are paragraphs and chapter headings. To make this short, here are all things books can do and the web cannot (yet or in most browsers) do: Complete control over the font. A lot of microtypography. Complete control over justification. Easily creating and maintaining a rhythm.
I'm sure there are a lot more. (Those points are also the reason why typography in ebooks still sucks for the most part, some of that is caused by the ineptness of those who create those books.)
Anyone who has ever had the book of someone with no design background in their hands will be able to testify that there is a huge difference between books done by a professional typesetter and an amateur (if that amateur isn't self-taught and doesn't otherwise care about design).
I've read books double spaced with monospaced fonts on shitty LCD monitors - I was able to ignore the terrible presentation because the content was amazing. I've read books where there was a lot of attention paid to design. The paper was nice, the font was carefully chosen, the drop caps were just right, the chapter bullets were spot on, and the cover art was exquisite. The content was awful. The great design did not make me think I'd spent the money well. The great design did not make me rate the book higher on Amazon.
I never recommend a book because of the nice typeface, or the lack of rivers. I only ever recommend a book because of the plotting or characters or writing.
I have not said (but some people seem to think I have) that design is a pointless waste of time. I have said that given the choice between great content or great presentation that I'd much rather have great content.
These are all visual examples. I want to try and avoid analogy (because I usually pick poor choices) but the same is sometimes true for sound. Some early Beatles[1] records are, technically, decidedly sub-optimal compared to today's technology. But that's okay, because they're still amazing. Some awful dull band recorded with 128 track and a bunch of processing and a great engineer is still going to be bad and bland because, well, just because.
[1] I say Beatles but better examples would be all the music on Trojan records, which are pretty lo-fi. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3AbgBOcYHg&feature=fvwre...)
I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.
Great design does not help shoddy content.
If an aspiring author asks me for advice do I tell them to work on the plotting and characters? Or do I suggest some bike-shedding around nice fonts and paragraph indentation styles?
I’m not suggesting that authors start bikeshedding. I want professionals to do their profession. Authors are rarely good designers.
> Books
> very simple presentation
"Good design is invisible". Not to be taken literally, but there is much wisdom in these words.
To me, this looks like the most INsane way to build a layout. What is wrong with a "let browsers and users choose their font size, their text widht, etc."?
For instance, both my wife and I are Kindle users, we have different font size, the text reflows almost always correctly, and who prefers bigger font has bigger font. My father is also a Kindle user and use an even bigger font because of his age. Soon he will have to read book on this device, because all fixed-font books will be too small for him.
The other side says "design is not needed", and that each user can manage their design settings themselves. These are the people that pushed for RSS and Responsive design, and that see design as more of an optional addon.
None of the sides are always correct.
In the end, designing for the web is designing for a lack of control. I can't control your screen geometry, display technology, browser compliance, fonts, and more. There is no fixed canvas like I had in print.
This isn't a limitation, this is simply the medium. Designing for this medium means that you must take your canonical ideal and figure out how it would be transformed under different stresses: tiny screens with partial user attention, big screens viewed from couch distance, monochrome screens which don't refresh quickly, modern browsers with fast javascript, and old broken browsers.
Great design does make things better, but it isn't about pushing the design decisions onto the user. There's no argument that Dustin produces beautiful works of art, but designing with manual layout of the kind he describes is designing against the grain of the medium. CSS has limitations, but so does print. Design is what you accomplish within those limitations, and how you go about accomplishing it in a timeframe that allows you to complete your project and make a living.
But the medium lets you account for this with style sheets. You can have a totally different layout for mobile, etc.
Media queries also let you adapt to devices/monitors, but realistically you can only cover the largest 5 or six cases.
At some point you're going to get user who's on some crazy screen resolution with a sideways monitor, or a strange tablet, and you'll have to sacrifice total control. 'Nature of the beast.
From my experience, it's mainly such hybrids that have this perspective on designing for the web. It makes it hard to work with people who don't see it the same way - either designers like Dustin or developers who don't fully appreciate the value of design.
Isn't that what always happens? That's one of the reasons designs from different eras look different: not just that fashions change, but that the output technology changes and allows a different set of design choices. No matter how much somebody in the 1940s might have wished to set some type a smidgeon wider or narrower, that just wasn't possible until the advent of phototypesetting in the 60s, and 1940s designers would have subconsciously altered their designs to fit within the limitations of their technology.
As a designer, if you aren't constantly trying to build stuff that's better than what other people think is currently possible, then you may have just become a cog in a machine.
However, this will certainly be abused by lots of people to create "an amazing experience online", with the effect that texts become harder to read.
I believe that's the purpose of this W3C Candidate Recommendation: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/
I agree that it seems silly that we still don't have columns in html, especially considering how wide monitors have gotten.
However, I'm not Adobe has the answer.
I find myself wishing for some kind of "layout bytecode" -- basically, machine-readable instructions which would size every element in a browser's page using custom layout algorithms that would depend on the size of the page and the size of font glyphs.
CSS would be compiled into this bytecode, but we'd be open to inventing new and better style languages which could be compiled as well. So we could create layout languages based on columns instead of floats, for example.
If this were actually implemented in newer browsers, it could actually be emulated in older browsers using JS libraries (although it would be much slower).
Note that this really only has to do with the layout properties of CSS. Things like color, rounded corners, drop shadows -- all that would still be implemented traditionally, but these aren't generally what people have problems with. It's the terrible layout algorithms of CSS which generate endless headaches.
"New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."
Write-up here: http://webdev360.com/adobe-lays-cards-on-table-with-standard...
In fact, the Jobs letter that the grandfather comment mentions, recognized Adobe's historical contributions to publishing and graphics.
Here are its first sentences:
"Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times."
You may disagree with Jobs' conclusions, or dislike Apple for various reasons, but the letter shows considerable insight.
"HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member."
Notice it doesn't even mention that Adobe is also a member of the standards committee just like Apple? Or how about this gem:
"Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit [bla bla bla] Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers."
You may not know it, but KHTML was pretty competitive, shipping with Konqueror, the default web browser in KDE, and it also had a lot of users including Nokia before Apple forked it and started to add their own code to it, a lot of the times Mac specific and non portable. It also fails to mention that Apple's own contribution to WebKit is far lower than that of KDE's developers, authors of the original codebase and later additions to WebCore like KSVG2, KCanvas, KDOM [2], or Google, the current largest contributor. It's pretty deceiving to claim that Apple just took a "small open source project" and gave WebKit to Google, Nokia, Adobe (they use and contribute to WebKit also) etc to use, and it's extremely deceiving considering the bad blood between KDE developers and Apple caused by the way Apple forked KHTML and managed their fork originally ([3] for an episode of that open source drama).
Anyway, this letter is just an episode in a long and entertaining grudge match between Jobs and Adobe, dating back to the days when Apple's own survival in the holy war against PC\Microsoft depended on Adobe's commitment to support MacOS, which was apparently not enthusiastic enough by Jobs' standards.
[1] Via a review for the recently released Final Cut Pro X, I found this old article about the origins of Final Cut, where Jobs claims
"But a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. "They said flat-out no," Jobs recalls. "We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, 'Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we're just going to have to do this ourselves.' "
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/...
Poor little Apple left to dry by the evil Adobe. Just look at the Wikipedia entry for Adobe Premiere to find out that outside the Jobs distortion field the software was released on Macs from day 1, in fact it was exclusive to Mac for the first versions. By version 3, a less advanced port to Windows is released, and the Mac version continues to be far ahead until... (surprise) 1998 when Mac and Windows versions reach parity and begin being released at the same time. It sure looks like Apple is trying to punish Adobe for giving the Windows peons access to software that was exclusive to Macs until then.
[2] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/07/10/199244/apple-to-adop...
https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/MJqS8pF7...
> Code
> We think there’s a need for a different type of code editor – we’re working on something and will have more to share soon.
Bit embarrassing, but I actually still use Allaire's Cold Fusion Studio from 1999. I think that was, at the time, the big brother to Homesite.
The problem is more that they don't compete well when the opposition are just text editors, and where people are perfectly happy to remove all the visual stuff.
I hope that's not what they have in mind, quite why they are showing off a website who's homepage doesn't have a single bit of text (view-source:http://juliegratz.com/) other than a copyright assertion I have no idea
Of course samples are only samples, but they would be better if they showed a real life scenario where you have to make it work for the current generation of browsers and the upcoming generation. You don't have to degrade it with CSS, just make it work somehow.
[0]: https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplatformruntimes/statist... [1]: http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center
By that metric, Java has 73%, but I basically never encounter a Java applet on the web (except when digitally signing my taxes) and increasingly hardly any Flash.
My comments were referring to the shift away from flash. Penetration in a constricting market is not ideal.
> 99% market penetration[0] is not losing.
IE had 98% marketshare once too…