The Kindle is Getting Support For HTML5

Nate the greatest writes "It looks like Amazon won't be adopting Epub after all. [Thursday] Amazon released some technical details on the new Kindle ebook format, which they are calling Kindle 8. There are a lot of interesting changes to the file, including new formatting and SVG images. The new tags are going to open up a whole lot of new possibilities for making Kindle ebooks."

Comments

Been there, saw that.

[Lisias]

Kindle is the new I.E.6; Is the Amazon the new Microsoft?

Re:Been there, saw that.

[Xugumad]

It's not that bad, thankfully (but still quite bad). It's easy to convert between ePub and Mobipocket ( http://calibre-ebook.com/ does so rather well and is free), as they're both HTML at the core anyway. The only real issues are book-specific parts like handling pagination or footnotes, where the standards (where there is one) tend to be incompatible extensions to HTML.

DRM

[ondelette]

What about DRM?

Re:DRM

[feedayeen]

What about DRM?

No DRM on personal documents like PDFs or Webpages

Re:DRM

[rolfwind]

Yes, but we're talking about books.

We're glad that there's no DRM on personal PDFs and webpages, that's so kind of them.

Re:DRM

[EdIII]

Exactly.

I have been interested from the beginning, but not offense or trolling intended, but who gives a flying $(#)($ about a new format.

As long as Amazon still has control over my Kindle and can remove my "property" without knowledge or consent I could care less about significant improvements to the file formats and features. It's interesting, but I would rather know that Amazon has fundamentally changed its policies. That *would* be welcome news.

This is like Sony introducing a new firmware with some cool features..... but we still have to overlook that we are on a locked down paranoid platform, the PS3.

There was a lot I did not appreciate about Steve Jobs, but man did he give us some freedom to truly own our music again. I wish I could download purchased books without DRM like I can music.

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

"In the agency model, publishers set the price and designate an agent--in this case the bookseller--who will sell the book and receive the 30% commission. Adopting the model for e-books tends to mean e-book prices will rise, something both publishers and independent retailers applaud. Publishers believe low e-book prices devalue their books and cannibalize hardcover sales. Under the agency model once a price has been set it cannot be changed or discounted by the retailer and independent e-book retailers believe the higher prices of the agency model allow them to compete with big e-book vendors. " (from this article)

At least Amazon was selling ebooks for reasonable prices and encouraging competition in the market. Now we have a racket that is enforced on all sellers. Neither he nor Amazon have been able to dissuade publishers from using DRM.

Re:DRM

[EdIII]

Interesting.

I never knew anything about that. Only thing I remember is that he gave me a viable alternative to piracy and/or purchasing over priced CDs.

It was the DRM that turned me off the Kindle from the first place, which is ironically, still a result from Steve Jobs. He was the one who showed me that eventually I could purchase DRM free music and I have not been interested in getting involved with any kind of transaction system that does not allow DRM free downloads.

Same reason why I will never have a Blockbuster account with video. "Purchases" are anything but.

Thanks for the insight into the publishing business. I don't mind paying the price for dead trees right now, because that does not have any DRM.

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

Yes, I too think that DRM-free ebooks are a good thing.

If you read technical books, O'Reilly offers DRM-free ebooks from their website in several formats, including PDF, ePUB, and MOBI (Kindle-compatible).

They do this by marking your ebook: "Prepared for [your_email_address], [Your Name]" on the bottom of the pages. I think this is okay since it discourages piracy and marks the book as yours the same as if your wrote your name in the front cover of a paper book.

I hope that other publishers will adopt this practice or something similar.

Re:DRM

[bickerdyke]

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

Yes. But unlike the iPhone, you can transfer eBooks from other sources to your kindle with a plain usb cable. (or even by email). DRM is no way mandatory on the kindle.

Re:DRM

[sensei moreh]

As long as Amazon still has control over my Kindle and can remove my "property" without knowledge or consent I could care less about significant improvements to the file formats and features.

Please do care less. But don't be careless about it. By the way, I fully agree with the sentiment.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor is DRM mandatory in iBooks. I sell content not protected by DRM. It's optional.

Re:DRM

[MadChicken]

I have a number of O'Reilly books, and none of them have that, at least in the ePub or PDF. It is not a bad idea though.

Re:DRM

[Sylak]

Yes. But unlike the iPhone, you can transfer eBooks from other sources to your kindle with a plain usb cable. (or even by email). DRM is no way mandatory on the kindle.

Actually, you can put DRM Free ePubs onto your iPhone through iTunes, so DRM isn't mandatory on either device...

Re:DRM

[tepples]

No DRM on books from Project Gutenberg.

Re:DRM

[bickerdyke]

I was thinking more in terms of "native" content. eBooks for Kindle, Apps for iPhone

Re:DRM

[DadLeopard]

You can, you just have to be careful what and where you buy! It's called voting with your wallet! If you like the right type of SF&F then http://www.webscription.net/ is one such place, then there is Fictionwise.com's mutiformat books they are DRM free, lots of places like that around you just have to look for them and not get seduced by the Amazons and B&Ns of the world!

Re:DRM

[Kristoph]

This is a terribly misguided and misinformed post.

DRM has nothing to do with the agency model. You can have DRM with or without an agency model. DRM existed on e-books long before the rise of the agency model.

The iPhone does not require DRM and many books from iBooks store don't have DRM on them. In fact, in most cases the ONLY reason why an iBook cannot be used on a Kindle is because of the Kindles non standard file format (without first converting it).

Jobs pushed for the agency model on books to eliminate Amazon's stranglehold on e-books. It was attractive to publishers. Nothing more, nothing less.

(It is true that by eliminating Amazon's stranglehold on books the price of e-books rose because publishers could set their own prices. Amazon has responded by by-passing publishers and trying to get authors to self publish books on Amazon. So it goes.)

]{

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

Hmm. It seems that O'Reilly has two types of ebooks:

1) Ebooks obtained through their Safari Books Online website (using download tokens) are marked with email address and account name as I described in my above post.

2) Ebooks purchased through their website, shop.oreilly.com, are not marked this way.

Re:DRM

[thesuperbigfrog]

I never said that DRM and the agency model were related. I was merely pointing out that Apple's entry into the ebook market removed seller freedom and empowered publishers. This was in contrast to the parent post which stated that Steve Jobs brought freedom to music by removing DRM from music formats.

I personally think that Apple was afraid of losing too much of the ebook market to Amazon so they made a behind-the-scenes push for publishers to adopt the agency model to thwart Amazon's price advantage. This enabled them to enter the ebook market using their shiny iDevices and sell content at the same price as Amazon. Apple's policy change to require a 30% cut of in-app purchases further pushed their advantage and forced the Kindle app (as well as other ebook apps) to remove their "Store" button that launched Mobile Safari to the Kindle web store.

As to whether the agency model is better for consumers is arguable. It is good that there are more choices in the market. Having an Amazon monopoly on ebooks would be bad, but Apple's tactics to bully their way into the ebook market are pretty ruthless. Such ruthlessness can only be attributable to Steve Jobs' desire to have Apple control all consumer content on iDevices. iBooks is still somewhat of an afterthought compared to iTunes' offerings in terms of music and video. For example, why can't I read iBooks on my MacBook Air? Why can't I access my iBooks by a web browser (ala Kindle Cloud Reader).

I'm not an Apple hater. I own a MacBook Air and an iPhone. I think iDevices are very nice, but I don't think that the agency model is good for the consumer. It drives prices up and reduces the ability for ebook vendors to compete in the market.

Re:DRM

[MHolmesIV]

Heh, in my view, the dead tree version has the most insidious DRM of all. It uses analog technology to artificially degrade any digital copies you try to make. It takes many hours of work and even more hours of proofreading to convert it to a DRM free digital version. On the other hand, it takes me less than 3 seconds to convert a Kindle book to a DRM free digital version. (Which I do under the DMCA exemption for ebooks that do not allow screenreader access)

Good News for Authors

[Sasayaki]

I'm writing a book for Kindle (naturalistic sci-fi, 61,000 words in) and I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...

If the Kindle supports HTML5 however, Google Docs will do a bang-up job (by and large) of converting it straight to HTML5. Good news for me I guess!

Re:Good News for Authors

[optimism]

I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup

Crikey.

I had no idea the Kindle conversion was as lame as you say.

I thought we software-folk had solved all the issues of converting basic formatted text about 20 years ago. Equations, vector graphics, embedded images...OK, they might still be cross-format hurdles.

But italics? Seriously? That's so 1980's

Re:Good News for Authors

[dgatwood]

KindleGen (at least in the shipping version, v1.2) is great as long as you don't mind 90% of your CSS going away in ways that are utterly mind-blowingly awful looking.

When generating content for Kindle for my novel, I have to produce a whole separate set of HTML source content with dozens of differences between that and proper EPUB (including a fair number of tags that aren't even legal in EPUB, but are the only way to get KindleGen to behave).

The short list is that:

• Right margins don't work.
• Width and min-width CSS don't work (but the HTML width attribute does).
• IIRC, padding doesn't work at all.
• The blockquote tag only indents for a single paragraph unless you close and reopen it.
• CSS class attributes with more than one class don't work. (Only the last one is used, IIRC.)
• Most CSS selectors that contain multiple tags with some symbol in between them are incorrectly treated in such a way that the rule applies to both classes.
• Font styles are completely nonexistent. You can't even do something as basic as specifying that parts of the content should be serif and parts should be sans-serif.

Basically, you should assume that you'll have to rewrite all your content to have exactly one CSS style for each paragraph or other block-level element, selected programmatically based on how you want it to behave. So if you want something to happen only on the first paragraph after a section heading in the appendices, you're going to end up with classes like " class='firstParagraphAfterSectionHeadingInAppendix' " or similar for those paragraphs.

I spent less than a day getting content working in a properly standards-compliant browser (including writing the code to translate it from XML), a couple more hours working around minor layout bugs on Nook, and around a week getting Kindle to look even remotely palatable. That's for somebody who writes parsers as part of his day job. I mean, don't get me wrong, I spent several weeks pounding on LaTeX for PDF output, so the Kindle experience was by no means the most horrible part of the process, but it was way up there.

Put bluntly, KindleGen isn't the answer. At best, it's the first 10% of the answer. The rest, you get to code yourself. That's why pretty much everybody I've ever encountered who has attempted to format an eBook for Kindle has pretty much come out the other side with a whole new vocabulary of swear words. :-D

Re:Good News for Authors

[inflex]

Ooh, we're also a bit of a lutantic asylum here - we use LyX / LaTeX for our fiction-novel works, though the PDF output is brilliant for printing - we still have to export to HTML and import to Calibre to get it to Kindle.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

Out of interest, why on Earth are you writing it in Google Docs? When I write things I tend to use LaTeX, which probably strikes most people as even more insane but it compiles up to lovely PDFs, and it's pretty quick to swap it to HTML and build up an ePub or MobiPocket. I could of course write straight in HTML (or in markup which could be easily swapped to both) but I'm very used to LaTeX.

I've not had too many problems converting properly clean RTFs into ePub or MobiPocket and vice-versa using Calibre. I find it's actually a lot easier to build the LaTeX version for printed copies, convert it into the ePub version for an eBook, and then just use Calibre to port it to different formats. I've not had a noticeable issue yet.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

Ah, should have read this before I posted. That's very close to my workflow, except that I export to ePub and clean it up before using Calibre to get it to Kindle.

(Though I don't use LyX - in my experience, which is years out of date now - it produces doggy LaTeX. I find it easier to just code it in Emacs. Kile produces reasonable LaTeX output if you want a GUI though.)

Re:Good News for Authors

[MaskedSlacker]

No, we write perl scripts that convert our LaTeX files to nicely formatted ODT files. From there it's save as .doc and upload. DUH. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Re:Good News for Authors

[Sasayaki]

I'm writing it in Google Docs because, well, to me it most accurately resembles what the final product will look like. Call me strange, but "seeing" it is important.

Technically Docs can convert to HTML too and it does a good job (as I mentioned), which the converter converts to their strange format. It's just that the Kindle converter, judging by my brief playing around with the converter, is very very strict. It's much more likely to pass if you build the HTML manually, which also produces much much cleaner code (CSS and styles are bad for Kindle, the Google Docs output uses a lot of both from what I can see).

That, and I really really like Google Docs. It makes it easy to share stuff with people who've foolishly volunteered to help, and I don't have to worry about constantly shuffling it between my iPhone, my laptop, my desktop, a net cafe...

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

Hmm, OK. I still think you're making more problems for yourself than necessary, though. Why don't you use a WYSIWIG HTML editor? Or LibreOffice, which may or may not make cleaner HTML than Google Docs? (I've no idea; I've not tried either. I stopped using word processor HTML export about twelve years ago when Word XP -- or even earlier; I forget -- spat reams of gibberish at me.)

Also, are you closely wedded to the Kindle Convertor? Can you not use Calibre to build a MobiPocket? Or are there features in the Kindle convertor that you need?

Sorry for the questions - genuinely interested. I've always targetted ePub and relied on Calibre to produce a readable MobiPocket for people with Kindles.

Re:Good News for Authors

[mibus]

I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...

Have you tried (say) Calibre's conversions? I've thrown random HTML files at it to create MOBI-format eBooks for my Kindle, and it's done a brilliant job, with no twiddling needed at all in most cases.

Re:Good News for Authors

[Sasayaki]

I'm not closely wedded to the Kindle converter, nope, I just wanted to make sure that it was accepted by the Kindle people. I've heard of Calibre but haven't actually tried it yet. I'm actually downloading it now to give it a shot.

What I'd really like is some kind of WYSIWYG eBook writer, but I don't think such a thing exists...

Re:Good News for Authors

[Xugumad]

Both ePub and Mobipocket (which Kindle uses) are HTML based at the core already. Download your files from Google Docs as HTML, import into Sigil ( http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ ) and you'll be 90% of the way towards an e-book.

All this refers to is Amazon adding more bits of HTML to the parts Kindle supports.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

You can get Sigil - it's a WYSISYG ePub writer. You can either write in the word processor window, or in the raw XHTML. I've not used it to build ePubs from scratch but I have used it to edit and clean them up and it's reasonably nice once you get used to its quirks.

Calibre's OK, but I'd stick to the command-line tools, if I were you. I find the GUI distracting and not really quite suited for the purpose I put it to, whereas the command-line tools are there to edit metadata (though you might want to edit the results by hand to avoid Calibre leaving its fingerprints everywhere) and convert from a multitude of input formats to a multitude of outputs. ePub -> Mobi/AZW is particularly clean since ultimately so far as I know it's swapping one subset of XHTML to another subset of XHTML.

Both are worth a try. You do lose the easy sharing that you're getting with Google Docs, but you can always replace that with something like DropBox.

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

Also I don't know how you're planning on selling, but going through Amazon's Kindle Publishing (rather than cutting deals with them directly, which most of us aren't anything like big enough to do) they say they prefer DOC uploads. They accept ePub though so that's what I feed them, and the results have come out absolutely fine. Some of the other online publishing routes -- like Smashwords, which I use in addition to Amazon -- have other requirements. Smashwords only accepts RTFs, and strictly formatted ones at that. For putting things up there, I cheat a bit and use Calibre to swap the ePub to an RTF and then spend an hour or two reformatting the whole damned thing to fit the Smashwords style guide... so that they can convert it back into an ePub almost identical to the one I started with.

Re:Good News for Authors

[Sasayaki]

I gave Calibre a shot -- it failed with the ODF, but the PDF worked fine. I didn't try HTML but I probably should.

I put the .mobi file into the Kindle simulator and it had a few obvious formatting problems (mostly to do with chapter headings and the occasional, minor issue) but it actually worked out fine. What I might do is use Calibre to convert the PDF or HTML to ePub, then use Sigil to clean it up as you suggest. The cleanup should be fairly minor and judging by how accurate it is I could probably get it done in a day.

That's actually a huge relief! Thank you! :D

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

No problem :)

Focus on converting HTML into ePub - the output from PDFs tends to be really doggy. I know the developers are trying to improve that, but they're really hampered by the fact that PDF really isn't well suited to reflowing, no matter what Adobe do to amend that. But HTML to ePub should be very clean, and ePubs are easy to edit either by hand or with something like Sigil.

(In case you're not aware, to edit an ePub by hand, change the extension from .epub to .zip, unzip it, and go into the OEBS directory, or whatever they've called it. The files will all be in there as either HTML or XHTML, and you can work on them directly to clean up the most stubborn problems. Or just use Sigil and access the files that way.)

Re:Good News for Authors

[inflex]

LyX v2 is quite good these days. It still has -some- hiccups on the LaTeX generation and mingling TeX directly into LyX can mean a few things are missed on the exports (for some reason it doesn't always seem to get exported if you're not going with PDF), however overall from a writer's perspective, LyX v2 is a nice compromise. As a side note, we're using the Memoirs style package, which in itself is a whole extra world of reading :)

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

I'll give it another look. I'm very used to hand-coding LaTeX these days but it'll never hurt to have other options :)

Re:Good News for Authors

[bickerdyke]

Wow. That is a statement where a sarcasm detector would ba actually usefull. (I wouldn't bet against people out there really doing that)

Re:Good News for Authors

[MaskedSlacker]

*whistles*

Re:Good News for Authors

[Chad Stansbury]

[plug]You might want to try using Scriptito instead of Google docs, as it can directly export to EPUB and Kindle/MOBI format... and it's free.[/plug]

Re:Good News for Authors

[Pembers]

I have a novel on sale in the Kindle Store ( Death & Magic , a murder mystery set in a school for wizards). I wrote it in OpenOffice.org, before I had any thought of releasing it as an ebook. When the time came to convert it, I exported it as HTML and used a text editor to get rid of all the crap that OO.o puts in just in case you want to re-import it and have it look something like it used to. This took a couple of evenings - I could probably have done it faster if I'd been braver with my regexs. It kept the italics without any problems. I put in some basic CSS to control the paragraph indents and make the chapter headings look nice.

I tried using Amazon's KindleGen program for converting the HTML to .mobi, but couldn't figure out how to fix all the compiler warnings. Then I found Mobipocket Creator, which did everything I needed without any fuss, and produced a file that looked perfect on my Kindle. (Well - perfect apart from the known bugs in rendering, such as the way it won't add more than a certain amount of padding between words, so a line can look too short if there's a long word at the start of the next one.)

I learned my lesson - the book I'm writing now (volume 3 of the series) is starting life as HTML in a text editor, so I control exactly what formatting goes into it.

Let me know when your book's on the Kindle - it sounds like the sort of thing I might like.

Re:Good News for Authors

[Tomato42]

Seconded for Kile, it's better than most of LaTeX editors (like the "sort-of-standard" TeXnic)

Re:Good News for Authors

[boristhespider]

(shameless plug coming up: if we're plugging stories feel free to go to my smashwords or amazon profile and get hold of some stuff. there's two free stories on smashwords and the others are a dollar apiece because that seemed to be the cheapest amazon would let me sell things for (i wanted 40c or so). for some reason the amazon profile is currently missing The Train will Never Stop, though it will be added in a day or so. the genre is basically fantasy of one form or another, though as far from sword and sorcery as i can get. i like to pretend there's more of a neil gaiman feel to things, but then i am very self-deluded.)

Re:Good News for Authors

[jfengel]

One advantage to going through a real publishing house is that an editor would remove 99% of your italics.

You want to break the mold, ignore the rules, do your own thing... go ahead. But sometimes conventional wisdom becomes conventional for a reason, and in the case of italics, I think most readers will agree. Used sparingly, they help something stand out, or compel a particular reading of a sentence.

But frequent use dulls their value, and it makes the sentences harder to read. Italics forces a re-parse. That's valuable, when you need it to compel a particular reading, but it grows tiresome very quickly. A well-crafted sentence doesn't need italics. The emphasis is part of the structure, both of that sentence and the whole rest of the paragraph.

Go ahead and get all e.e. cummings on us, and maybe you're breaking out a whole new style. But the odds are you'd be better off following the rules on that one and being novel with other aspects of your storytelling.

Re:Good News for Authors

[gozar]

I'm surprised more people don't just type up their ebooks in any text format using Markdown. Easy to write in whatever editor your have (for example, storing the manuscript in Dropbox, allowing one to write on their computer, their phone, their tablet, etc.) and then use Calibre to convert into whatever format you want.

Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Is there a utility yet that converts all Flash (Actionscript, not just video and animations) into HTML5? Even if just enough to make a prototype for specifying how the human recoders finish the job, in less than 80% of the time to hand convert from scratch?

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[optimism]

Who cares? The only useful applications of Flash are:

1) To provide a wrapper and controller for video-on-demand, until everyone has a web browser that natively supports low-bandwidth video formats.

2) To populate classrooms with a multitude of poor shmoes who are really excited to make some of that fancy-shmancy keyframe animated stuff, though they don't really know what they will use it for.

Flash died years ago. Most Flash content was dead on arrival. Let it go, and program your new stuff in HTML. Doesn't have to be HTML5. HTML4 is perfectly capable for most stuff.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[_merlin]

Flash lets designers build interactive content. Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that. You may not be interested in it, but there are some gems buried in NewGrounds along with all the crap. None of the other solutions are accessible to designer types the way Flash is. I predict one of two things will happen: Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[0123456]

I've never seen a web site built in Flash that was anything other than a slow, bloated piece of crap.

Any time I go to a web site and it says I'm going to have to spend five minute sitting at the 'Loading Flash Crap' animation I find something more useful to do with my time.

Just let the damn thing die.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash lets designers build interactive content. Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that. You may not be interested in it, but there are some gems buried in NewGrounds along with all the crap. None of the other solutions are accessible to designer types the way Flash is. I predict one of two things will happen: Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.

What will happen is that Adobe will make its tools output formats other than just flash so they work on iPhones/iPads as well as Android devices: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder.html

But, in the mean time, Flash will hang around for about as long as it took to get people to stop making their web sites only work correctly with Internet Explorer. (Speaking of which, how well is that process going?)

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Serious Callers Only]

I don't view flash any more, haven't for a few years.

The only content I miss is video on some websites like the BBC which refuse to serve their video as video files, and graphics like the ones you mention at nytimes.com say ( though actually not many sites produce infographics worthy of the name).

Having graphic content in HTML is going to be a lot better for everyone (more accessible, easier to mash up, easier to extract data), and when adobe completes migrating their tools to produce HTML, there really will be no excuses left. Its actually pretty easy to build interactive content right now with HTML, but when the wysiwyg tools switch, all the laggards will switch with them.

Actually as a designer I'd say that adobe doesn't really get designers any more - their tools feel like quark in the 90's - entering a long slow decline where the marking department add useless features every year like Export for Microsoft word or magic repair features that could never work, while ignoring glaring ui inconsistencies, awful installers, and crashing bugs, and then gouge design departments for as much money as they can manage. The latest versions of their cs suites have been a disappointment to me for this reason. It feels like all the people who care about the quality of the products have left Adobe and Macromedia has been dead for years.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[EdIII]

There is another thing to consider:

Proprietary platforms are not doing well. IIS is dead and dying. Most systems I run across using it are 3rd party CMS for time clocks, payroll, and patient record systems. It is costly to implement since it requires quite a bit of MS licensing to get off the ground, and (IMO) a developer premium to modify and extend the systems, if that is even possible.

There are still a lot of development firms and in-house coders doing ASP, .Net but those all have higher costs than Open Source once all things are considered. It is no coincidence that the majority of the world's websites are on Apache/Linux.

Internet Explorer 6 still exists mainly because the high costs of developing those systems in the first place has/is precluding their maintenance and upgrades because the companies can't fund the projects to do it. When possible they are seemingly, to me, switching out for open source platforms so they are not "held hostage" like they were before.

It's hard to get a new IIS/ASP based website/system approved when an equivalent PHP/Javascript website/system running on Linux/Apache will get the job done just as nicely and have access to a heck of a lot more open source code. Not to mention future maintenance is easier since I am pretty sure there are quite a few more developers out there for PHP and Javascript than there are for MS proprietary platforms.

So unless you are part of die hard MS group, you are not going to be choosing IIS any time soon for a new project.... not by a long shot.

How is this relevant to Flash?

Just today I was looking for a plug in to do something on a project and ran across something that looked fairly interesting, but required a bunch of Flash. I turned down specifically because of Flash.

I am not interested in proprietary platforms at this point, which includes Flash when a little extra searching usually allows me to find something else. After about another 10 minutes of searching I came across a plug in which supported IE 6.0+, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and did not require flash, or any other dependencies outside of what was already included in JQuery.

So why would I choose Flash at this point?

Adobe knows this. They are preparing to abandon Flash. From what I have been hearing Adobe is very hard at work to make a solid product to create interactive content without Flash, but HTML5 instead. PDF is embedded in business deeper than fax machines at this point at they know it. They want everybody that uses Adobe on a daily basis to create content and systems to be able to continue to do so. Transitioning away from Flash only makes sense for them in the long run.

Adobe is not alone either. Microsoft has already thrown in the towel on Silverlight. Both of those companies can see the writing on the wall... and that is the future will be open standards and open source. In order to keep their positions they are both going to develop tools not tied to their proprietary platforms, although I predict Adobe will be far more successful.

Flash is dying. It is going to die because of the developers and business considerations when choosing what platform to develop on don't predispose somebody, that is open minded, to choose proprietary systems when open source is so much cheaper and having a website that is simple means the users need far less installed on their systems and browsers to make it work.

I'm sorry.... the days of me having to install several ActiveX controls just to gain access to a site/system are coming to an end. That includes Flash too.

I don't think it is an exaggeration either. I surf with a Flash blocker all the time. It is getting less and less frequent that I have to click on a Flash object to enable it. Even on major websites like CNN.com, it has become noticeably less frequent when it used to be Flash heavy on pretty much everything.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Serious Callers Only]

I love people who use the word serious to describe what they do ( and by implication consider other approaches non-serious and unworthy of attention). If you can get over your disdain for the rest of the world you might find there are good reasons to avoid locking your content in a binary shell. You can stay in your silverlight/flash binary ghetto if you want, but in the meantime lots of people are building the most popular websites on the web without flash using a huge variety of tools but delivering plain old HTML- those websites don't need flash, silverlight or any other plugins ( though typically they use it for trivial stuff like ads, if at all), and yet they serve most of the content on the web. I guess they aren't serious though.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[optimism]

Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that.

Actually...Macromedia/Adobe built their businesses by "getting" wannabe designers.

You know, folks who think they can just buy a copy of Director/Flash/Dreamweaver/Photoshop/Premiere/etc, take a couple of classes at the community college, and be a "designer".

fwiw...I was using Flash when it was FutureSplash Animator, back before MM acquired it in the mid-1990s. I really enjoyed Flash too, doing interactive animations with physics, flocking behaviors, etc. But I'm not sentimental about it.

Professional designers have either the breadth of skills to take on whatever tools will do the job, or the depth of skill that they can partner with professional tool developers. The specific tools are irrelevant to the professional designer. Deployment is what matters, and ubiquitous open standards (eg HTML & JavaScript) will always win on that front.

However, Macromedia/Adobe figured out that wannabe designers are a much larger market than professional designers.

I predict one of two things will happen: Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.

Flash will live as long as Adobe can sell copies of the dev tool to folks who take (or teach) community-college or art-school classes in how to use it.

From a professional and real-world deployment perspective, the only thing keeping Flash alive is the video codec. Microsoft has already tried to chip away at this with their Silverlight plug-in. But both are doomed as soon as enough people have web browsers with decent video codecs (eg WebM) built-in.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[SanityInAnarchy]

Macromedia/Adobe got/gets designers, and too many people don't realise that.

Even assuming this is entirely correct, Adobe is planning to produce authoring tools for HTML5 directly. As for existing content...

You may not be interested in it, but there are some gems buried in NewGrounds along with all the crap.

NewGrounds is hardly the reason Flash won't die. If it was just Newgrounds, well, hey, there are some gems buried in platform-specific native game binaries -- and not all of these are Windows, mind you, there are some real gems which ran on Mac OS 9. It's an issue, but it's not a point against moving forward to a viable replacement -- especially something like HTML, which is going to be a hello f a lot more future-proof than Flash.

Flash will die, and this kind of creative content will die with it until a new challenger appears; or more likely, Flash will just refuse to dies, and the geek elite just won't understand why.

So, of this, option one is a lot more likely. Flash refuses to die right now largely because of video, and it's being steadily replaced there. There are a few niche places where Flash can still do things HTML5 can't -- right now, audio strikes me as most likely, and even that is being addressed -- but it will eventually die.

In the mean time...

None of the other solutions are accessible to designer types the way Flash is.

If you're more than a one-man Newgrounds operation, it doesn't actually matter that much. You know what designers are good at? Designing. There's a reason Flash has a reputation for being slow and buggy as hell, a constant CPU drain, etc. Some of this is Flash's own fault, I'm sure, and I can back this up by comparing YouTube's performance with Flash versus any native player on the same video file. Most of it is enabling designers to attempt to program, with similar results to enabling executives to attempt to program in Excel.

The same tools will eventually come to HTML5, and I'm alright with that. Please don't take this as an elitist stance of, "Leave programming to the professionals." All I'm saying is that if the existing stuff isn't accessible to you, some of that is because it's overly complex, but a lot of it is because you aren't a programmer. There's no reason you couldn't be, and many designers do make that leap (or simply team up with a programmer). But you do have to invest some time in learning something about how computers actually think.

To put it another way, I don't think I would be taken seriously if I attempted to do serious design work with MS Paint. There are tools which let me easily throw together a comic, but I don't think this compares with this or this. These aren't the best examples of either, but honestly, if the ragecomics went up in smoke, I really couldn't care. That's kind of how I feel about Flash, especially when it's used by designers.

If you're neither willing to learn some real programming or work with a real programmer, then I'm not sure I will miss the loss of your content. If you are willing to do either, then I have to imagine that Flash vs HTML5 isn't a huge issue.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[MaskedSlacker]

bass acwards

You misspelled bass ackwards. /dyslexic spelling nazi

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

I care. I've got a large old Flash program that I want to convert, because Flash is indeed "dead". Its interactive features are HTML5 features which would be much more work in HTML4.

Why would you think I want to keep Flash, if I'm asking for a converter to get rid of it? You have a one track Flash-hating mind.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Most SIP phone systems that work are based on Asterisk or FreeSwitch, and desktop ethernet phones instead of workstation GUIs. Though many still leave their admin interfaces in Flash.

They all kinda suck, but not so badly they can't be used. And not Microsoft suckage, anyway.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Your username is "Serious Callers Only". I "love" irony.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks, bra.

Do you know how well Swiffy works on a Flash client to a Flex app, not just a Flash animation/movie/game? What doesn't it do right?

And what about Adobe's Wallaby - is Swiffy any more complete a porting tool? Because Wallaby can't convert much more than a .FLA movie.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[tepples]

they still haven't got their shit together enough to employ a declarative language for layout (that works) -- so you're still writing imperative code to generate declarative HTML.

Would it be possible to make a declarative language for layout on top of JSON? If so, you could write the imperative code to fill a DOM once and then just write declarative layout in your JSON markup after that.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[optimism]

I care. I've got a large old Flash program that I want to convert, because Flash is indeed "dead".

Sorry. My reply was inappropriate for your question...and yes, I was expressing some of my historical exasperation (call it hate if you prefer) with the unfortunate fate that Flash was used for anything except the keyframe animations for which it was originally designed.

To answer your question: No, there is no generic Flash-to-DHTML converter.

As someone who has used both Flash and DHTML from their very beginnings, I can state with 99.9% confidence that a general-purpose converter will never be created. To make such a converter, you would have to re-implement the entire ancient & gnarly Flash runtime engine in JavaScript. From a platform perspective, that is mostly possible, even in HTML4, but it would be an enormous task. Afaik, no one has a business case that would remotely cover the expense.

If your "large old Flash program" was implemented in Flex, you have a much better chance of sponsoring a converter project. The Flex framework is much higher-level, with XML descriptors of the UI, but it provides a subset of the functionality already implemented in DHTML frameworks like SmartClient (www.smartclient.com). So a converter is entirely possible, orders of magnitude easier than a generic Flash-spaghetti-code to JavaScript converter.

Its interactive features are HTML5 features which would be much more work in HTML4.

Not if you build on a high-level RIA framework that has been around for many years. See e.g. the smartclient link above to get a sense of what has been possible for many years now. You may be surprised.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Well, my other option is to hire someone who can reverse engineer my Flash/Flex app into its network APIs and user features, using whichever tools they prefer. Targeting probably HTML5 because I want a port to something at the start of its lifecycle, not late middle or end like HTML4. Do you know where I can look for someone like that? Preferably in NYC.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[optimism]

HTML4 will never go away. It is an open standard with BILLIONS of users. It is impossible for any corporation, or even government, to break backwards compatibility with that standard.

HTML5 is still just a vapor-buzzword, and is totally irrelevant unless Microsoft, Apple, and Google all agree to implement the same spec. But if they do, it is just an extension of HTML4.

The crossover between advanced Flash/Flex development and advanced web development is very very slim. My recommendation is to hire a Flash/Flex specialist to reverse-engineer and document your app, then hire a DHTML specialist to rebuild it using a suitable framework. SmartClient is my first choice, but Ext JS is another option if they can provide the features and support that you need.

Good luck. And again, sorry for the mistargeted first reply.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

HTML4 won't have nearly the hold on mobiles, and HTML5 features are more suited to their more varied runtime constraints. Some of those features make sharing among client sessions better, and yes video. That's important for my app.

Your strategy is what I have in mind. When I find a consultancy with a good existing gallery, I'll go with the tools/frameworks they're good at.

Nice talking with you.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Serious Callers Only]

And yes, a "serious" web application (NOT a webpage) requires a lot more than HTML/JS can currently reasonably and *efficiently* provide. I can (and do) design and implement apps in Flex in a fraction of the time it would take with the sloppy mess that results when you have a "huge variety of tools" that were never designed for the purpose of RIA and don't work together nearly as well. These applications are "serious" because they are expected to provide the ability for users to efficiently and correctly input non trivial data like GIS (map) data, scientific data, financials data and other similarly "serious" subjects.

There's nothing about HTML/JS which requires you to create a sloppy mess, and there's no need for one person to use a huge variety of tools - I was pointing out that the tools you use to server HTML can vary hugely, and can easily be interchanged without the user noticing, not that you are required to use a huge number of tools.

The disadvantages of http/html as opposed to desktop apps are in many cases actually strengths, and I wouldn't touch something like GWT either with a bargepole because they are working against the strengths of the web to try to make it into something it is not. Enforcing a stateless UI, being agnostic to the sort of device reading the data, and always serving the same resource at the same URI regardless who asks are huge advantages when it comes to data integrity and a stable, predictable UI even for what you consider 'serious' subjects. The concept of RIA is in itself questionable in my opinion, born of desktop developers moving to the web, and can easily result in the sort of mess you denigrate in your post as inevitable when using plain HTML.

The aim of plugins like Silverlight and Frameworks like Flex is to lock users into an ecosystem which they can't escape later, and also to try to reproduce all the flaws and failings of desktop UIs on the web, which is why I'd prefer to use other tools which do not lock me into using Adobe products. Personally I wouldn't trust Adobe with my career or my clients data by using Flex, but if you feel it's a stable platform to target, that's fine - doesn't mean you should denigrate other tools as toys or only capable of creating social networking sites - that's patently bullshit and just undermines your position.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Serious Callers Only]

I "love" irony.

Me too; that's why I chose the handle.

Re:Real SWF - HTML5 Converter

[Doc Ruby]

Me "too".

Re:DeDRM

[shutdown -p now]

How would it make DRM any easier? DRM'd Kindle books are already "encrypted" HTML, just a much smaller subset of it - MobiPocket. Since DRM itself is completely orthogonal to the book format, I don't see how them moving towards HTML5 would change anything.

Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[MacTO]

I had a Kindle for a while, and it does what it is supposed to admirably. This new book format is bound to do things even better, which is great.

But everyone else seems to be using ePub. Libraries use ePub too. Which really means that if you buy a Kindle you're stuck in the Amazon ecosystem. Well, unless you find a publisher that is willing to use unprotected PDF or MOBI files. That sometimes happens for the books you buy. But that won't happen for libraries (which need some sort of DRM).

And libraries are a serious concern for me. The ebook/digial audio book section is already confusing enough with device support.

Re:Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[iamnobody2]

overdrive is working with amazon to provide library content, many libraries already have it. also kindle users are not "stuck" in the amazon ecosystem anymore then ipod users are "stuck" in the itunes ecosystem. i have several hundred books on my kindle, and haven't bought any from amazon.

Re:Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[am 2k]

also kindle users are not "stuck" in the amazon ecosystem anymore then ipod users are "stuck" in the itunes ecosystem.

Not quite. I can take the AACs I bought on iTunes and play them on any music player/operating system that supports the format. I can't do that with ebooks from Amazon.

Re:Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[yahwotqa]

Getting ebooks from Amazon? That's crazy talk! Kindle is purely for reading ebooks obtained elsewhere.

Re:Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[demonlapin]

You can, however, run the Kindle app on a Mac, a PC, a iOS device, an Android device, or the web, so the only people who are left out are those who want to buy Amazon ebooks to read them on a non-Kindle eInk reader and yet don't have the technical skill to strip the DRM.

Re:Sorry, but this is a PITA ...

[radish]

I'm reading a Kindle book from my library right now - Overdrive now support Kindle for all their ebooks.

Re:DeDRM

[dgatwood]

Topaz isn't based on HTML. From what I've read, it basically consists of a series of glyphs and information about their placement on the page—more like PDF than HTML.

Re:DeDRM

[shutdown -p now]

Ah, my apologies, I missed the mention of Topaz in the original post.

That said, from what little I've read about it, it seems that Topaz is a legacy format that's mainly designed for quick-and-dirty scanning of existing paper books. That would explain why it's so vanishingly rare in new releases, which are prepared for e-publishing from the get go. The most common one there is .AZW, which is MobiPocket wrapped in Amazon DRM - i.e. HTML. I don't think I have any Topaz books in my collection, judging by the fact that they all reflow according to changing reader size and let me change the default font - and I have a few dozen books purchased from Kindle Store.

Of course

[Sycraft-fu]

At this point, there is no option. Publishers will not allow for un-DRM'd ebooks. So unless Amazon was willing to have only titles they publish on the Kindle, and they could convince authors to accept no DRM, they must have it. Amazon, being in the retail business, will do what the publishers want.

Re:Of course

[DadLeopard]

Funny how the ONLY eBooks by my favorite authors that they do carry are the one from publishers that demand DRM, and they carry none of the book from Baen publishing that does non-DRMed eBoooks! Seems like a much of an Amazon policy as the publishers' policy!

Re:Of course

[DadLeopard]

I think you will find that those that Amazon publishes themselves are also DRMed! So it is also their policy!

HTML5? Not Really

[DERoss]

Per a discussion in the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html newsgroup, not all of HTML5 is supported in Kindle. See the Subject "HTML5 on Kindle - Not really html5?" at news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html.

Jobs wasn't the first Steve

[tepples]

You can thank Steve Jobs for the fully locked-down and now ubiquitous agency model that practically all publishers use.

We can thank him for popularizing it, but Jobs wasn't the first Steve to use the agency model. Xbox Live Indie Games had been using the agency model, where the publisher sets the price and the store gets a fixed percent cut, for a few months before iOS 2 came out.

Making HTML5 animations how?

[tepples]

Professional designers have either the breadth of skills to take on whatever tools will do the job, or the depth of skill that they can partner with professional tool developers.

So what "professional tool developers" have published an SVG-animation or canvas-animation creation tool that approaches the capability of even Flash from a decade ago?

Re:Making HTML5 animations how?

[optimism]

So what "professional tool developers" have published an SVG-animation or canvas-animation creation tool that approaches the capability of even Flash from a decade ago?

You missed a big one. On Internet Explorer, which still has almost twice the market share of any other browser, the vector graphics technology was VML.

Honestly, the tools that use SVG, Canvas, and VML, to provide decade-old Flash vector graphics, are very hard to find right now. As I mentioned in another post, SmartClient (http://www.smartclient.com) is at least one framework that does this. Afaik they smartclient guys do not provide the tools to the general public. But they do at least have some raw demos at e.g. http://www.smartclient.com/isomorphic/system/reference/inlineExamples/drawing/Drawing.html

Vector animation: who needs it?

[tepples]

Actually doing vector animation at a reasonable frame rate and bandwidth. Video is terrible at this for bandwidth reasons

I'm aware that converting vector .swf to .mp4 bloats the file size by a factor of roughly ten, and I've repeatedly brought this up in comments to Slashdot stories. But ardent Flash haters like to remind me that we're no longer in the dial-up days, and networks and codecs have improved to squeeze 240p video even over a last-gen cell phone connection. So what should I say to make these haters remember caps?

Screensavers for Kindle!

[ZapoTeX]

The Kindle is a great device! No matter the format they choose, it'll be possible to switch to/from it with Calibre. And hopefully, we can also change the screensavers on our Kindles: http://www.kubizo.com/changing-kindle-screensaver.php Ciao!

Misleading title

[Kartu]

Amazon is going to introduce yet another proprietary format. Whether it will be using html 5 or html 10 internally is completely irrelevant.
Title is misleading, trying to make it look as if amazon was going to support common standards like html 5.
There is one for ebooks already, it's called epub and it's not and is not planned to be supported by kindles.

epub

[vanyel]

I will only be buying books for the kindle as long as they can be converted to epub so I know they'll be readable on future and alternative devices. If the new format successfully blocks that ability, then I'll stop buying them. Even now, I look for non-drm'd versions first, making baen books my primary source of reading material. Simple as that...