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Comment by technojunkie | Hacker News Reader

Does Adobe have a strategy to fight HTML5 or make good progress with open standards b/c of the Typekit purchase? We don't want Adobe to shut down Typekit by any means b/c of how awesome it is and I'm afraid Adobe is resistant to HTML5 as an open standard. Please don't throw money at solutions to killing amazing products which enhance HTML5.

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Adobe has shown no contempt for HTML5, while HTML5 pundits continually rip Flash. Adobe has repeatedly stated that their Flash product and their Web products serve different goals and markets, and they are in the business of providing cross-platform solutions wherever there is a demand. If you watched the keynote today, you would have seen that Adobe itself is creating some of the best HTML5 / CSS3 dependent applications. They would only be crippling themselves to undercut the progress being mad in open Web standards.

I am paying attention, trust me, but I am a little dubious, too, considering Adobe's past. If Adobe tries to throw money at bringing down HTML5, I surely hope this is not the beginning of that. May Typekit continue to thrive and improve without the bloat and closeness that Adobe likes to incorporate into its products.

What part of Adobe's past are you referring to? The part where they support open web standards? Or are you merely referring to Flash, that component that was doing more for "standards" back when browsers weren't.

How quickly people forget.

Haha, I hear you but I am also referring to the quality of their products.

Yes, Photoshop et al have added a bunch of really great features but along with that comes convoluted, inconsistent and sometimes ugly UI features. Is it worth the expensive prices? Not really.

Remember Homesite? They integrated that into the convoluted trash that we now have called Dreamweaver. Homesite's features made Dreamweaver the editor to have 7 years ago but I graduated from this editor b/c I couldn't stand how bloated it was and Dreamweaver fell behind.

What's to say this won't happen to Typekit? It could easily be integrated into a bloaty, proprietary crapware that will essentially kill it like many others Adobe has gotten rid of. Sorry, I just don't have a much faith in Adobe.

Adobe is strongly supportive of HTML5 and open standards. In fact, we've recently released two tools, Edge and Muse, that are built on HTML and related technologies. We intend to help Typekit continue to grow and continue to leverage open standards.

I'm glad to read this and hope that HTML5 and open standards becomes a huge priority for Adobe and not an after-thought.

I see decent intentions with products like Muse but its faults outweigh its benefits and I do not expect this particular product to see much life unless its vastly improved or changed.

As a web coder, I heavily rely on products like Photoshop and am disappointed with bloat and inefficiencies I've experienced over the years, so I really have hard time believing the same fate won't happen to Typekit. That said, I am going to try to keep the skeptic in me quiet as I watch what happens to this awesome product.

I really want to believe you, but I've spent the last five years undoing horrors wrought by Dreamweaver on my clients' websites. Why should I believe this time is different?

Another point to keep in mind is that our support of HTML5 and open standards crosses a variety of audiences. The folks who appreciate our contributions to jQuery and WebKit aren't usually the same ones who appreciate the easy visual design Muse offers. So while a given single product may not make sense for your workflow, the larger point is that we're strong supporters of HTML5 as a platform going forward. That support is being instantiated via a variety of tools, services, and frameworks suiting a variety of audiences.

I would like to down-vote this question as it makes no sense given everything Adobe has done to the contrary of these concerns over the past year. I'm not a huge fan of Adobe, but I can appreciate their efforts regardless.

I advise the author to review the adobe labs and check out what has been done re:HTML5 and CSS3 over the last year.

http://labs.adobe.com/

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/fireworks_css3mobile/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/muse/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/captivate_html5/

The list goes on.

In addition, they've been a big participant in releasing fonts to typekit already. Why would they close the doors?

"Why would they close the doors?"

Very good question, but one that needs a responsible answer. Adobe wants the web to live on using its proprietary formats like Flash while a growing minority is resisting this and switching to HTML5. Adobe's efforts are a good start but have a long way to go. Muse, for example, has good intentions but in practice is a horrible product with extremely convoluted code.

I'm not a Flash hater as I love the fact that YouTube grew on this standard and many fun games are because of Flash but I also see the reason why HTML5 is a much better standard to get behind and why technologies like Flash will ultimately die unless they become more open.

You have to understand Adobe's view of Flash. The reason they were pushing so hard for Flash support is that they wanted to be the gateway to multimedia and interactivity on mobile devices. For the longest time, Flash was how you played video on the web, and Flash was how you made rich, interactive websites. When iOS came along it threatened that, and Adobe wanted to protect their stranglehold in order to maximize their profits (e.g. of Adobe's flash content creation tools).

They've now realized that this isn't going to happen; people are abandoning Flash Player in favour of more compatible, more nimble technologies. Adobe's a big company, but they know which way the wind is blowing, and they've responded by shifting with it.

The way things are looking, 'Adobe Flash' (the content authoring tool) is going to move to being an HTML5-and-fall-back-on-Flash-Player tool (or vice-versa). Eventually, Flash Player will die the death it deserves, and 'Flash' will just be the name of the authoring tool (along with Dreamweaver or Coda).

Basically, Adobe wanted to lock up (or at least make a lot of money at) the cross-platform mobile dev environment. They realized they can't do it with Flash Player/swf content, so now they're trying to do it with Phonegap Build and HTML5 content. More power to them.

Sadly, Flash still is how you play video on the web and make a lot of rich, interactive presentations on websites b/c only in the last few years has HTML5 started taking off. We're stuck in a proprietary world until we get over the bickering and complacency of open standards.

I'm definitely not trying to discredit the HTML5 work Adobe has done to play catch up but part of me feels like it's too little, too late in some ways.

Adobe has to make money, they obviously have a huge grip in the design community and they're not going away anytime soon so we need to push back as much as possible to make sure they don't continue on with bad practices and listen to the community, which increasingly they are. Sadly, too many of us feel abandoned when some of our favorite software gets left behind (Homesite) or bloated (Photoshop/Flash/Illustrator).

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