SAN FRANCISCO–Hoping to bring magazine-style layout tools to Web publishing, Adobe Systems tonight released a prototype browser specifically designed to let Web developers test the company’s proposed formatting technology.
The technology, called CSS Regions, lets programmers easily create multi-column layouts, place text in various polygonal shapes, and flow around objects in the middle of text.
That technology has existed for years in the print publishing world, but it’s generally missing from the Web, and its absence grows ever more conspicuous as magazines and newspapers move to digital publishing, especially on tablets such as Apple’s iPad.
The formatting features are notable, particularly because they’re dynamic, said Arno Gourdol, director of engineering for the Flash runtime at Adobe.
