Hook, line, and sinker on that point.  My agency is actively working with HTML5 for mobile and web use.  We're a client services agency, and what my fine friend from Mozilla has raised with regards to the technical implementation is exactly what I ran into.  I downloaded, installed, and profiled, and the moment I opened the code it made me freeze.  Those of us working with HTML5 for production use are definitely going to want a better technical implementation on exported code, as he described.

I'm also concerned about the file size for mobile devices.  This is an area that I'm sure will be improved, but if you want to build and HTML5 tool for Mobile, file size optimization is going to be a large part of the decision to use or not use the product.

Overall, it's very promising.  It reminds me a lot of early versions of Flash.  I definitely recognize it for what it is, but the technical concerns around the implementation and file size are definitely a no-go for us to consider it if those don't get addressed.  I'm not trying to be harsh: just honest.

Nice first effort.  I personally look forward to watching where you guys take this!

Jonathan Lambert

Workhabit, Inc.

I actually meant you should make the animation as accessible as possible, so keep the text in (it's not excessive or mucked up HTML).

So if it's text the user is animating, it should be in <h1>,2, etc, or <p> or <li>s if she wishes to animate lists. But an animated text in an HTML page that does not sit in accessible markup defeats the objectives of keeping separation between content and presentation which should mean adding animations (and styling) ON TOP of the markup.

Will you be adding text HTML elements to the Menu/Toolbar ?

Happy to read this conversation.

I wish we (Mozilla and Adobe) could work more closely together on things like this. Adobe's creative tools are the best. Mozilla loves a healthy web. We want Edge to start-out the right way as much as you do. Why don't you invite Rob for a technical discussion/talk with the Edge team!? Together we can do this right

best, Tobi (Mozilla Labs)

http://twitter.com/tbx

Hey Rob,

I think you are bang-on with your comments regarding this early release of Edge being targetted at "ad-creators". To be fair to Adobe though, those folks are probably some of the most eager to get their hands on HTML5 gadgetry without necessarily caring whether or not it is true HTML5 - if it moves and works on an iPhone then it will tick the HTML5 boxes they are probably interested in.

I guess to an extent I can empathise with the Adobe guys too around the decision to use DIV based animation rather than Canvas / SVG.  As someone who dived straight in with Canvas for Tile5 it was disappointing to see CSS 3D transforms get the benefits of hardware acceleration on mobile devices while my optimized to the nth degree JS canvas implementations could not come close to matching that performance.

As a result, I went to the effort of implementing different renderers and included a DOM based renderer for both performance and compatibility reasons.  This seems to be a common theme in HTML5 mapping, gaming and "animate a something" JS libraries that care about and target mobile devices.  Either target canvas first, learn some hard lessons and fall back to either a DOM or hybrid implementation; or simply just go with a DOM implementation first.  My heart still lies with Canvas and I believe that this will be the "one ring to rule them all"... eventually.

I think another challenge that needs to be dealt with is reconciling the different types of animation options we have at our disposal in HTML5 land.

For each of the various approaches - DOM, Canvas and SVG there are different approaches that can be used for animation.  Common to all is the applicability of CSS3 transforms so I guess that's where Adobe started.  I'll certainly be interested to see what kinds of things Adobe cook up in the Canvas space, but expect that that might come after first animating SVG elements with CSS3.  I have to say that if Adobe manage to mix and match programmatic canvas animation with CSS3 animation of standard DOM and SVG elements then I'll be pretty impressed.

Thanks for posting your original question - I hadn't bothered having a look at Edge yet until you posted, and now I'm cooking up some hair brained schemes for some Edge mashup techniques

Oh, and good luck Adobe with the continued evolution of Edge.

Cheers,

Damon.

I agree with almost anything that Damon said, but I had some better experiences with Canvas so far though and that influences my opinion.

I believe that the reason why majority of developers believe that Canvas is slower than animating DOM elements with CSS transitions and animations is because Canvas is not yet hardware accelerated while CSS is. Because of that all the simple benchmarks will always show the advantage of CSS. It is missleading though, because in real life it will often be the case that developers can implement various optimizations that will give massive speed improvements when rendering on Canvas - mainly different ways of buffering once rendered composites of images - I don't think it is the case with DOM (and I witnessed development of one of the greatest HTML5 games engines in works out there). These kind of improvements can't be easily benchmarked though.

I can tell from my own experience that with city builder like game for the map of virtually any size (as long as memory allows us and at the cost of startup time) and even lot's of animations we can get over 20fps on iOS devices (iPhone 3GS, 4, iPad 2, in the past I also had access to iPhone 3G and iPad 1, but not anymore - they probably are fine though) even if we deal with retina resolution on iPhone 4. It feels just fine - no lags are noticable.

Hi! My name is Chris and I am a UI Architect at Epsilon.

I think the part that gets me is that right now everyone is saying this is an HTML 5 animation editor, when it actually isn't. Will it be with a different 'renderer' later? It seems so from the responses above.

However, it isn't at this point. I am already seeing "html5 demos" built in Edge on the web. There is already a pollution of "what is html5" going on, where basically anything that isn't flash that moves is html5. All of the "Edge HTML 5 editor is a Flash Killer" news articles are humorous at best, and aggrivating at worst.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=adobe+edge+fla sh+killer

http://blogs.computerworld.com/18719/adobe_flash_killed_by_free_html5_ tool_edge

I don't use flash anymore except small things that may need it, but I am a big HTML 5 advocate and a long-time javascript developer. I just hate to see so many people start to be misled, and it already hurts when talking with clients who are misinformed because of the latest news article that says their flash is dead and I need to recreate it in HTML 5.

Message was edited by: Chris Coleman

Hi Mark!

It seems my first comment came off as rude or snippy, I didn't mean it to be so at all. I know this is a preview, and I did say that it seems you will take advantage of canvas/etc in the future, I did read the thread, and I was happy with that response . My frustration is not with Adobe or the Edge tool itself, but with what is being called HTML5 by the community. Yes, the tool can use SVG already, and again, I know it is a preview, but when creating objects and animations directly in the tool it is using DOM and Javascript, which we have been able to do for a long time, albeit without the sexy editor and with more kludgy techniques

I am really just echoing the original sentiment, that even though cross-browser compatibility is important to an extent, that if you are really making a "html 5" animation studio, it may have been better to actually start with canvas or at the very least svg, and then if needed throw in a fallback render to dom objects.

I really look forward to Edge being the editor that we use for HTML 5 animations, barring that it doesn't just become an export option from flash's creative tool (export to html5 or swf). It is really needed, Sencha's CSS3 Animator is getting a lot of attention too. I think these tools will be very important to me and my team.

Again, I didn't mean to seem rude or upset toward the tool itself or your team. I look forward to this using canvas and or svg as its actual render in the future.

Chris.

Message was edited by: Chris Coleman

I work as a developer for AT&T's website. I prefer SVG because we need to have our site run on devices with differing form factors. So, I'd like to be able to generate and edit static and animated SVG in Edge.

Hi there,

my name is Tobi, I'm a Web Developer and generally delighted by people who try to push web technologies to the next level. Edge seems promising and Adobe is a big player. My point is that products like Edge could get browser vendors to implement cutting-edge technology faster (eg hardware accelerated canvas2D on the mac) or could get the w3c to standardize things faster (eg SVG Compositing [1]). So keep up the good work.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGCompositing/

Tobi (…just dreaming)

Mark, I'd love to do an interview with you guys for the people of HTML5 feature on the Mozilla blog - you up for that? You can reach me at cheilmann @ mozilla.com

I made this the other day with just the drawing tools available in edge. Not the greatest looking group of rectangles, but seems to work on everything. When the SVG's are completely integrated, AI + Edge will be a killer combo.

http://home.comcast.net/~ryanrockers/turtle.html

I'd also love to see some form of consiliation with firefox and Edge. But I also feel times are changing quickly, and am waiting to see how HTML 5 will be effecting Edge and what new capabilities may arise!

Joseph,

Affiliate Marketing Grad