InDesign and HTML5

[Alma Strutt]

Interesting article on in5 written by Keith Gilbert in the latest copy of InDesign magazine. Does anyone believe it's just a matter of time before we see such a feature as a menu item rather than a plug-in?

[BobLevine]

No, but it is the only one that's reality.

[Justin Putney]

FYI, I reached out to an InDesign product manager and received this response, "I can confirm that InDesign team has no plans to work on HTML5 export."

So it appears that your information, TheGalaxy, is not accurate. Not sure your source.

[THEGALAXY]

[Justin Putney]

TheGalaxy, is this from the online Adobe help?

They're not connected to the product teams, so I'm not sure how they could make such a claim. The product manager stated that this is not on their road map.

[BobLevine]

Some bot just telling you what you want to hear. We get that all the time here.

[rob day]

 If you think about how websites are developed there is limited use for single HTML coded pages. To develop a site of more than a few pages you need a content management system where the page display is scripted via a language like PHP (i.e., WordPress). An HTML5 export might be useful for sketching out a web page but it’s hard to see a huge demand for that, and it would just compete with the Publish online feature.

[Jongware]

> .. An HTML5 export might be useful for sketching out a web page ..

And even then the users of this function would complain loudly and vocally that Adobe sucks and it is a useless feature because that web page does not look anything like the paper pages they so labouriously produced with all of the running headers, columns, GREP styles, OpenType features, paragraph composing, text wrap around floating objects ...

[BobLevine]

I do more websites than anything else these days and I'd just as soon get a sketch drawn on the back of a napkin.

I had a nightmare of job last year when a client insisted that a site I was working on be pretty much pixel perfect which might have been a thing 10 years ago but everything is responsive these days.

[THEGALAXY]

We never use Indesign to make websites though. We make educational resources and are using HTML5 to replace the old interactive Flash content. The beauty of Indesign is the ease of quickly making up a resource that can be deployed to print and digital output.

With Flash essentially redundant now we are exploring the best workflow. Our designers already know Indesign so being able to get them to save to HTML5 without too much drama is the goal. Also, in our coder dept I know at least two of them deploy Indesign (along with other Adobe tools as required) to make various content that is then uploaded into whatever CMS platform the client has. 

[BobLevine]

I know how to use a hammer. That means nothing when the job requires a saw!

[THEGALAXY]

You're a funny guy.

[BobLevine]

I'm a real hit at parties. With all this stay at home stuff, I have stay in form somehow.

[rob day]

But imitating Flash’s capabilities would take more than HTML5 output, for Flash-like special effects there would need to be some sophisticated JavaScript output as well. The InDesign SWF export never did much more than the page flip. Ten years ago I did a fair amount of ActionScript coding and I never once considered using ID’s SWF export.