Design and Web

We just got back from an exciting week at Adobe Max. We made a lot of announcements around HTML5 and were pleased to see the communities reaction to our intent to contribute back to jQuery and Webkit to help improve the Web.

While there are a number of areas that will drive our contributions over the next few years we think that Digital Publishing really stands out.  It’s an area that is very exciting right now (especially for magazine publishers) and something that is embedded within Adobe’s DNA.

Digital Publishers face the same challenges that any other developer faces in the multi-screen world.  How can I make it cost effective to target multiple devices?  How do I ensure that the content is searchable and discoverable? How can I produce high fidelity content?

We believe that the separation of content, layout and formatting that is provided by HTML & CSS has a lot of potential to solve the adaptive layout & design problem.  The challenge is that the language and the Browsers lack the capabilities for designers to achieve this goal today.  So, this is one of the first areas that we’ll be spending our time on.

The video below shows some of the prototyping work we’re doing around Webkit to improve text wrapping and layout capabilities.  The team has taken the approach of extending CSS with a few new elements utilizing the webkit- prefix so that the designer can adequately describe their intent for the content as the page is resized to simulate working across different screens.  We look forward to working with the Webkit Open Source project and of course the W3C to contribute our work back in the most appropriate way.  And, as always your comments are very much appreciated.