Adobe embracing the Open Web

[Gruden]

Adobe’s MAX conference in the US two weeks ago included some interesting announcements. It was particularly exciting to see Adobe firming their commitment to open web technologies, with acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap, and new support for CSS3.

Typekit have a technology and licensing arrangement that allow websites to incorporate a wider range of fonts than has traditionally been supported. Designs regularly warrant the use of more than the standard dozen or so web-safe fonts, be it for brand or aesthetic reasons. Developers have long struggled to support these font choices, with workarounds including image replacement or creative front-end solutions relying on Flash. Neither approach has been good for accessibility though, with images or Flash text missed or misread by screen readers, and with such text failing to respond to user settings such as changes in font size or colour.

More recently, developers found a way to use @font-face, a recent CSS extension with wide, if inconsistent, browser support. Typekit, among other providers, sprang up to simplify the implementation across browsers. More importantly, they’ve been able to work around the other major barrier to custom font use: licensing. Font replacement was long in a dubious gray legal zone, but it was an accepted practice so long as font files weren’t themselves being distributed. The @font-face technique, however, downloads font files to a user’s local machine. The font foundries’ licenses rarely support this sort of distribution.

Typekit demonstrated that people are willing to pay to use custom fonts — via a simple subscription service. We hope that Adobe can bring their own fonts to the table, and use their historical relationships with the font foundries to negotiate licenses for a wider variety of choices.



PhoneGap is a development toolbox that allows cross-platform mobile development using HTML5 and a set of abstracted JavaScript APIs. An open source effort, the programme currently focusses on iPhone and Android, with demonstrated support for Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, and Symbian. With the mobile market increasingly fragmenting, it’s important for developers to be able to support a range of platforms. It’s a bonus that we can do so while maintaining a common code-base, and while using languages and tools that we’re already familiar with as web developers. There’ll always be a place for native development, but for the vast majority of use cases, cross-platform development is the best approach. Moreover, for apps being built around web content or web services, building in web technologies means that we can share capabilities between the apps and client websites themselves, minimising redevelopment, or the amount of content management required.

PhoneGap joins Adobe’s cross-platform Flash Builder support in the mobile development toolbox. Flash Builder allows a developer to build a Flash or Flex-based application for multiple mobile platforms, again encouraging the reuse of common code, potentially with different skins supporting different UI paradigms. We expect Adobe to increase PhoneGap’s capability in actually building applications for multiple devices, and with an injection of support can expect development to keep driving forward, extending support for the different platforms’ APIs.



Finally, Adobe released a proposal, through to the W3C FX task force, of a CSS3 Shaders extension. A minor feature, in the scheme of things, but an interesting data point. The extension allows web developers to use a range of cinematic effects, previously only available when using Flash. While it will take a little longer to gather wide support, we can expect support to be rolled into the most common mobile browsers in the near future. What’s particularly interesting about the release was called out by Adobe’s John Nack:

So, yeah: Adobe’s using Flash-derived technology to make HTML5 more competitive with Flash.

Crazy, right? Not at all: this increases your ability to present visually rich experiences, and that increases Adobe’s ability to sell you tools for creating those experiences. The different playback technologies are just means to those ends.

While we work in Flash and Flex, we’re also strong supporters of open web technologies here at Gruden. It’s exciting to see Adobe embracing the open web (the sometimes-known-as HTML5), and improving the dynamic between the two approaches. We always welcome better tools in the toolbox, and look forward to discovering what Adobe can make of them.



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