Reversing course, Google rejects Adobe Web publishing tech

Reversing course, Google rejects Adobe Web publishing tech(news.cnet.com)

39 points by sciwiz 12 years ago | 19 comments

leoc 12 years ago |

Ah yes, the Open Web, brought to you by MS, Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Op^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H. Remember, if there's anything you don't like about their decisions, you can change things just by starting your own web brower and getting your first hundred million users.

wycats 12 years ago | |

I hate to agree with this troll, but I don't see how to disagree :(

leoc 12 years ago | | |

Thanks—though I'm not a troll. Here's a longer discussion of the problem and what could be done about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810259 .

A more straightforward response would just be to call for HTML to be brought back under the control of the W3C. There are certainly merits to that, but at the same time a) W3C has its own obvious flaws as the overlord of HTML, b) no matter how benevolent a dictator W3C would or could be, even democratic (or quasi-semi-democratic) control is not the same thing as actual openness in the form of de facto (not just notional) forkability, and c) there's no easy and obvious way to get the yoke of W3C control back on the necks of the browser-vendor cartel, no matter how desirable it might be.

Regardless, one important first step is for people in general to have a clear-eyed view of what the present situation really is. One necessary part of that is for people to stop having a reflexive feel-good response to the 'Open Web' slogan.

baldfat 12 years ago | |

Troll is wrong. Engineers don't make things that are dependent on closed standards (stares at different frameworks especially cocoa touch framework). We don't need a new Flash!

leoc 12 years ago | | |

I'm not a troll. It's pretty obvious that the Web is significantly more open than Flash or iOS or what have you. That's not sufficient to make it open.

ch0wn 12 years ago |

I highly recommend reading the original thread instead of this horrible writeup: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

Especially Håkon Wium Lie, who isn't even mentioned in this article, brings up some really convincing points against CSS Regions.

frik 12 years ago |

I would say the reason is Google Docs! The current version doesn't use contentEditable [0] anymore, Google wrote a custom renderer in JS using one DIV per line with custom word wrapping, etc.

With Adobe's CSS Regions and other improvements [1] everyone could write an Google Docs competitor (single person mode) in one hour. Of course, Google and Microsoft with its Office Web fear this possible upcoming situation.

It would be awesome if some browser devs improve "contentEditable". It's really sad, there are so many bugs in Webkit and Firefox bugtrackers and got submitted related to this topic and no one fixed them. And no new features arrive either for years. Read some source code TinyMCE & co and you know what I mean, a lot of hacks to work around browser bugs.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich-text_editor

[1] http://html.adobe.com/webplatform/

afsina 12 years ago | |

Did you actually read the actual conversation? https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-d...

frik 12 years ago | | |

Yes. The Google Groups discussion made it clear that Blink devs are not interested in Adobe's patches for several reasons. And the real reason seems be more political (Google Docs interests) than anything else.

What's weird is that even Microsoft IE10+ and Apple iOS 7 support CSS regions! And Chrome (and Opera Next) want even remove multi-column support, or at least fall back to a inferior bugg solution, wtf.

What I don't get that Mozilla proposed their own inferior solution. It's reminds me of Mozilla's movement against WebSQL, a very sad story for HTML5.

nilsbunger 12 years ago |

This should be handled by the web-standards committee. Yes it's slow-moving, but solutions that only work in one browser will balkanize the web.

If I were Adobe I'd try to build a javascript-based solution for now, and push on the standards committees for the long term.

dictum 12 years ago |

"1.4 How does this affect web standards?

We have sufficient market share on the desktop that a few months from now, we will be in a position to unilaterally dictate them.

We hope to leverage this control to achieve the same dominance in mobile eventually."

—

"In practice, this allows us to call the project "open" while simultaneously ensuring Google will be the only effective contributor to the Chrome and Blink source now and in the future. We've had enormous success co-opting the language of open source in the past to imply our products are better, and we aim to continue with that strategy."

http://prng.net/blink-faq.html

rcsorensen 12 years ago |

Dear Google, other things you might want to do to make your rendering engine faster, especially on mobile.

* Proxy all mobile connections through an html-simplifier

* Ignore inline elements like <strong> and <em>

* Remove the vertical part of the box model, and disallow any vertical positioning statements

* Simply serve raw html to the end user. In these days of semantic HTML5, users should be able to read it anyway.

hardboiled 12 years ago |

CSS Regions considered harmful: http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmf...

By Håkon Wium Lie,the father of CSS, the CTO of Opera, and a pioneer advocate for web standards

kevingadd 12 years ago |

Short-sighted. Chrome's original performance push didn't come at the expense of web platform features and that's part of why it was able to supplant existing browsers.

Any claims that this will improve performance in the long-term are misguided: These kinds of layout features are necessary, so stripping them from the core (especially when other browsers are implementing them) will result in a nasty mix of browser-specific pages and low-performance javascript shims.

dragonwriter 12 years ago | |

> Chrome's original performance push didn't come at the expense of web platform features

What evidence is there that it did not come at the expense of Google support for any proposed Web Platform features that Google could not efficiently implement?

checker659 12 years ago | | |

The evidence is the feature-full browser that was Chrome (?)

Retric 12 years ago | |

You can get the same effect without java-script using Wrap and cutting an image into multiple sections. So, while useful long term there is little immediate need to add this feature if it's causing some issues.

morkbot 12 years ago |

Would be great if instead they would implement CSS Books "standard" http://books.spec.whatwg.org/