SlideShare ditches Flash for HTML5

[Lewisham]

This is great news. After Scribd's terrible move to lock my content away behind their paywall, I can now start uploading my slides to Slideshare and get the same HTML5 loveliness.

Bye, bye, Scribd!

[dxbydt]

I put my math thesis ( PDF file ) on scribd and sent a link to my professor. He was like, you want me to pay $20 for your thesis ? It was quite embarassing considering he was on my thesis committee..morover the equations in the PDF were messed up when I accessed them through scribd, though if I download the PDF and access thru Adobe reader, everything looks okay.

[hello_moto]

Speaking of Scribd. I didn't know they have a paywall so I decided to check how it works and BAM, they logged me in using my Facebook account immediately!.

I need a separate browser just for facebook.

[masklinn]

Save yourself the trouble and go with Speakerdeck directly. It's lovely — at least as a consumer of presentations — all my trips through Speakerdeck have been absolute pleasures so far.

[ashconnor]

Indeed. I recently ran YSlow? on my blog and it was a embedded Slideshare in Flash that was causing load times to increase 400%.

[bentruyman]

Heh, HTML5. http://i.v3n.us/ASQf Guys, this is just a non-Flash version. But I guess blasting it out there with the HTML5 logo gets a lot more attention, at the cost of confusing non-techies about what HTML5 really is.

And trust me, this is a discussion I have ad nauseam with clients.

Regardless, I appreciate the move Slideshare.

[notatoad]

i've never thought of myself as a non-techie, but apparently i am confused about what HTML5 is as well. i was under the impression it meant rich web apps built with standard compliant technologies. there's a lot of HTML4 in HTML5, it's not exclusive to the few new elements.

[nikcub]

I wondered the other day who owns the html5 trademark and the logo. It should only be licensed to sites that are actually html5 - same for browsers.

It shouldn't be hard to come up with some criteria for both apps and browsers as to what is html5.

this definitely isn't, since the markup can't be parsed and made sense of as to what the document structure is

[yuhong]

To be honest, how many web designers (let along the average user) can tell the difference between HTML4, CSS2, HTML5, CSS3, etc... without using view source?

[jeremymcanally]

Excellent. I was hoping they would eventually go this route, but it didn't look likely (though Scribd's move in this direction was a good indicator it would happen eventually).

I wonder how they'll fare against Speaker Deck (http://speakerdeck.com) once they get up to full steam. The experience at Speaker Deck is certainly prettier.

[SandB0x]

I'm still not sure what the point of SlideShare is, especially when Chrome has a PDF presentation mode.

[u4]

Woah! It was only a few hours back i came to know about speakerdeck claiming to be the non flash (& non sucky) alternative to slideshare. And now this. Giant move!

Now if only slideshare cleans up its UI/X a bit, I might never leave.

[janogonzalez]

Just after the launch of SpeakerDeck(http://speakerdeck.com/)...

[jswinghammer]

This is a lot easier if you don't support PowerPoint animations. A few years ago I used to work on a competing product and we did support PowerPoint animations. I thought about how to support animations in HTML and JavaScript quite a bit and it just became obvious that doing it in Flash was far easier.

[nkassis]

Could you list some of the issues you had a few years ago? I'd like to know if there now solutions to your problems or if you'd still have issues.

[esdweb]

This article could be the press release (or footnotes to it) that Jobs never wrote or would write. What I mean is, when Steve Jobs announced a couple of years ago that Apple would go HTML5 instead of Flash, there was great oohing and ahhing but no concise explanation for those of us lesser mortals as to why HTML5 is the better path. And this article does it in a couple of hundred words.Specifically: 1) From iPhone to desktop, it's one and the same document; 2) Document files are smaller and load faster; 3) SEMANTIC WEB accessible. Our poor semantic web, so visionary and so non-starter. Perhaps the growth of HTML5 will save it.

[revscat]

Actually, Jobs did write in some detail on this very subject:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

He specifically mentioned the same points you brought up, plus a few others.

[jfb]

Perhaps the growth of HTML5 will save it.

I fervently hope not.

[kreek]

Wow, nice work. As someone making the same transition for a large Flash app I can attest to how hard this is, especially for accurate font rendering. I've seen a lot of comments on HN along the lines of Flash sucks why don't you use HTML5? As the post points out it's not a trivial switch, canvas is extremely low level compared to Flash's Display List.

edit: HTML5 = abs positioned divs and CSS3 fonts in this case, plus some text rendered as part of background images, still it's really difficult to go from PDF to HTML no matter how you do it :)

[phzbOx]

When Apple announced that they didn't want flash on their i(pod|pad|phone), I instantly knew I'd see this in the forthcoming months:

  1) The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, 
       Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers."

That was such a huge move from them. I couldn't imagine another big company than Apple to do that.

[ksri]

I like the section on Error Handling. They do image comparison to confirm the page looks good. Does anybody know any open source library that would do this? I had tried a naive approach for something similar, and had failed miserably.

[danw]

Does that include putting hideous adverts across the slides in 'HTML5'?

(I miss the early scribd & slideshare, before they started trying to make money to survive by plastering the place with adverts)

[__mark]

I have been using latex with beamer for the last year, I don't do many presentations, but really it helps with staying on message that you have to be able to so it in latex.

[BlueZeniX]

30% faster, because it's a rewrite?

SWF is a very compact format and text rendering is optimized for speed (animation). I doubt their flash viewer was built on decent code...

[pornel]

They did a bit more ambitious version: they're using CSS fonts and absolutely position every single letter to preserve original text layout in HTML.

[mattmanser]

Are fonts working for anyone else? As they're all pixellated horribleness for me now. They look especially bad in their demo. Probably just a small bug.

[kosso]

They're still using the Flash version in the embeddable/oEmbed-discoverable version.

[kapilmohan]

SlideShare 30% faster and flash free! Do they get carbon credits for this?

[gto16108]

An HTML5 driven mobile SlideShare is great news right now :)