Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Well, sure - what's he expecting? PDF is a low-level, mostly unstructured display format. Converting that to fully semantic markup that recognizes all aspects of high-level document structure is probably an AI-complete problem.

For those of you not familiar with the gory details of PDF, it basically uses absolute positioning for each character. If we converted that directly into HTML it would be a disaster. So, we actually extract quite a bit of structure on top of that, recognizing spaces, lines, columns, and paragraphs, which enables us to write much cleaner HTML. Scribd (and most PDF readers) does this with heuristic algorithms that make reasonable guesses.

In the future, we'd like to push those algorithms further, and extract ever more semantic markup. But this is a "nice to have" for us - mostly, people just want the documents to display correctly and load quickly. And, anyway, expecting the output of an automated converter to match what a human would write shows a basic ignorance of the state of computers and AI.

Web applications are not the same as web pages. A web page is a document, which ought to have simple clean markup. A web application on the other hand is a tool that can edit said documents. It's more "meta."

To expect the tool to have the same sort of semantic purity as the documents it interacts with is overly idealistic. It doesn't matter as much what we can systematically infer about an application, it is more important that the content be accessible in some sort of standard format.

Similarly, Scribd's HTML5 viewer, is just that, a viewer. Not a full fledged PDF to HTML converter. It's primary purpose is to allow a user to experience a document in its entirety in the browser. In a world of trade-offs, and priorities, the markup of the viewer itself is near the bottom.

This reads like self-parody. The author doesn't like the way their <P> tags are positioned. Could there be a more ridiculous criticism?

From where I stand, Scribd's HTML5 implementation (if it turns out as good as the demo) is one of the biggest leaps forward I've seen on the web in a while, as well as one of the most impressive pivots I've seen a startup make to turn a negative into a positive. It's a huge technical challenge to do what they're doing and get it right; one of those things that seems hard to people who haven't worked on it and turns out to be far harder than it seems.

There's also the minor detail that they're producing this output for an enormous class of inputs, so to nitpick the generated HTML as if it were written by hand is to miss the point colossally.

Edit: on another note, it's probably a positive sign if people with this mentality don't like your work.

I think this dude needs to read the first part of Coders at Work with Jamie Zawinski (in reference to Netscape). A version 1 system RUSHED to the public that actually works and has few bugs is amazing. The fact that it's difficult to read and hard to follow can be fixed just as bugs can in due time. I think the concept of "get it done and fix it later" is better than "take forever to work on it and someone already produced." I guess that's an age-old question we all ponder though.

When people start whinging about the HTML markup for your thing, you know you're on to something. Early on, we got a guy complaining loudly about how Twiddla sucked because we had put a DIV into the HEAD tag to display a loading message. Not sure exactly how it affected his user experience, but there you go.

If the best criticism that people can come up with is about a piece that nobody can ever see or be affected by, you're probably doing something right.

And if it were proper, semantic HTML5, what problem would that solve? I'm failing to see what benefit that has to the user. They don't need to see the markup; it just has to work.

A good rule of thumb: if you think a product is absolutely great until you hit "view source", you're probably missing the point.

If the author can't be bothered to even pick out a couple of snippets to support his claim, I can't be bothered to pay his post any mind.

"every major HTML5 app today is built using un read able markup"

Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that applications be built using technologies and best practices designed for documents? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup.

However it often absolutely does make sense to render the documents created with these applications in clean markup.

That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

The real lesson here? There are no awards for correctness. If the biggest and best webapps use pig-ugly HTML, the rest of us can probably stop worrying. Build it, launch it, bodge it.

Well, the best part about this article is that it got me to check out Scribd. I'd been ignoring it, although I saw previous commentary about them moving from Flash to plugin-free. I'm impressed with the HTML render - it looks smooth. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.

It's like 2004 all over again. Back then, some people were complaining that "links" on Gmail where not really links, but underlined blue paragraphs with onclick events.

Remember that? This was the most advanced web application ever made, it had 100x the storage capacity of every mail provider at the time, awesome search capabilities, and the first mainstream use of asynchronous loading of data.

And yet, this people were mad because the links were not real anchor elements.

Go get some perspective kids.

OK, this guy is ragging on what is a good tech demo, but "HTML 5" seems to be the 2010 equivalent of saying "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" when it comes to getting early adopters to check out your stuff, and Scribd threw around the term without it being, hmm.. authentic.. (that is, HTML 5 as a concept means more than merely producing a document that would pass validation)

Don't give me problems, give me solutions. And by me I mean scribd, not me.

Is this article a joke? Scribd's new HTML based PDF renderer is working fine.

I think the author missed something.

He's kinda right, a file format meant for printing fixed size pages will inevitably suffer from some impedance mismatch when automatically converting it to a relatively simple document format meant for screens.

But I disagree with the claim that it isn't HTML. It sure isn't pretty but a if you define HTML as the input that the HTML parser of today's browsers can handle (rather than the HTML spec) it is perfectly fine.