200,000 HTML5 pages will go live on May 5, 2010

May 6, 2010 14:21 GMT  ·  By

Scribd CTO Jared Friedman has announced that the company will be scrapping its Flash document viewer in favor of its brand-new HTML5 technology it’s been developing in-house for the last six months.

Mr. Friedman told TechCrunch that “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.”

The news will not be a pleasant read for Adobe's management, which recently saw many major Internet players dumping Flash technology in favor of more lite and bug-free HTML5 tools. YouTube, Apple, Gmail, Vimeo and Microsoft have been slowly chipping away on Flash's reputation, dropping it for HTML5.

Scribd, the leader in social publishing and online reading, was using a Flash Player to present users with their desired documents. With its new HTML5 solution, the documents will now be presented as part of the web page, making it SEO-friendly and easier to present on mobile devices.

Starting with May 5, 2010, 13:00 Pacific Time, Scribd will debut over 200,000 HTML5-driven pages. These documents will have every feature present in its Flash player, but will be solely powered by HTML. This includes cool tools and functionalities like zoom, search, anchors and scrolling.

By migrating to HTML5, all Scribd-hosted documents will be available for Apple devices, like the iPad and iPhone, while also making them available to a less technically educated part of its readers who will not need to download any Kindle app or install Flash plugins. The documents will be presented right in the reader's browser as a very long web page with sidebar bookmarks to avoid long scroll actions.

Besides Scribd, another web service announced its plans to migrate to HTML5, Wistia, an important business video sharing platform. Their decision was fueled by the growing number of customers demanding HTML5 support.