Re: [Swftools-common] Swftools, PDF and HTML5

[Matthias Kramm]

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 11:25:22AM +0200, Martin Perez <address@hidden> wrote:
> It looks like though that market is moving towards HTML5 and many players
> are moving their flash based viewers from flash to this standard. So a few
> questions arise with regards to swftools and custom viewers. So, is there
> any plans to provide tools to move from flash to html5? Some kind of
> swftohtml5.

I do have plans to open-source building blocks for converting documents
to HTML5. That is, it's something I want to do.
It's yet way too early to provide any details or time estimates though. 

One of the many questions is whether to incorporate things like this
into swftools (possibly renaming it), or to start a new project centered
around document conversions in general, as oposed to SWF.

pdf2swf, while popular, has always had a different scope than all the
other parts of swftools, so maybe it (and it's descendants) deserve its'
own project.

> Any plans to an html5 basic viewer? 

Probably not. Same as with pdf2swf, the best approach was always to give
people a basic conversion solution, and let them craft their own UI
around it.

> Or alternatively, what would
> be the necessary steps to move our documents converted with swftools to
> html5.

Well, right now Flash has still a very high penetration, so let's not 
be hasty. pdf2swf still gets the job done, and I'm still actively
supporting it. 
That being said, once the time has come for a pdf2html5, I'm sure
there'll be a swf2html5 as well- in the same way that there currently
are swf2pdf (etc.) tools that convert (pdf2swf generated) swf files
to other formats.

Also, for the curious, here are a few links to the new HTML5
conversion technology of Scribd:

Keynote from our CTO:
    
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wultk6iKXk&feature=PlayList&p=B415D73E4A22F82E&playnext_from=PL&index=8
HTML5 example documents:
    http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5
    http://www.scribd.com/documents/5/Paper-5
Engineering blog (will start containing HTML5 technology posts on Monday):
    http://coding.scribd.com/

Matthias