TechCrunch reports that self-e-publishing site Scribd is moving away from its current Flash format for uploading and viewing documents, and converting everything into HTML5.
Erick Schonfeld writes:
Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “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.”
This means Scribd documents will be viewable (and look great) in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser, among others. In fact, they will be viewable in an estimated 97% of browsers, without the system slowdown or crash risk inherent in Flash.
Although Apple made a stir recently with its forbidding of third-party development environments such as the Flash-based one Amazon had been developing, Friedman has been working on this project for the past six months.
The conversion kicks off with just 200,000 of the most popular documents today, but by the time Scribd finishes will include every page.
