Imagine you've created an Internet start-up that blazes a new trail, boldly merging document storage with social reading. Your site stores and displays books, articles, magazines, presentations, and other written and visual content uploaded by your users. Cool!

Fast forward three years, and you've successfully gathered tens of millions of documents, which you display to millions of users using a custom built Flash reader. Woo hoo!

Now imagine you're sitting around a conference table when some young buck pipes up with a simple question: "Why do our users need a special application to view our content?"

Eyeballs up, three rapid blinks accompany a sharp intake of breath. You're left, mouth agape, eyes forward. No answer is forthcoming.

Any answer you give — anyone can give — is justification for the past. There is no answer justifying your future, let alone your present.

And now, you're faced with your legacy being just that — legacy.

Meet Scribd.

The world's largest social publishing and reading website, Scribd provides 50 million monthly readers access to over 10 million documents. Scribd's Flash-based document reader has been embedded more than 10 million times across the web, on sites like The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and TechCrunch. More than 1.4 million searches happen on Scribd.com every day.

With a vision to "liberate the written word," Scribd enables users to upload documents of varied formats — including PDFs, PowerPoints, Word docs, and EPUB files — and make those documents searchable, social, and embeddable in websites and blogs.

They found themselves in this very situation six months ago, and they decided to answer that very simple question.

Now that's <progress>

Touting the open nature of HTML 5, the rich new capabilities therein, and eschewing the very notion of using a closed third-party environment like Flash to house their core product, Scribd has made the jump from legacy to enlightenment.

The process isn't an easy one; Scribd has a lot of documents, and a lofty goal of displaying those documents via HTML 5 exactly as they appeared as PDFs, and it hasn't been done before. Ever.

So why would Scribd undertake this challenge?

Aside from the joy of wrangling a new technology to suit your business model, it's the idea that Scribd documents can become fully native participants in the global fabric of the web. They'll be searchable via Google and Bing. From Scribd's great technical blog (http://coding.scribd.com/): Encoding documents in this way has numerous advantages: no proprietary plugins like Flash or Silverlight are required to view documents; we take full advantage of built-in browser functionality like zooming, searching, text selection, etc.; state-of-the-art embedded devices are supported out of the box; and even on older browsers it degrades gracefully (to HTML text with built-in fonts). 

No doubt, Scribd has a lot work to do. And they've got big technical hurdles in front of them. Consider the variety of information presented in a document — it's more than words and simple graphics. There are tables, bitmaps, gradient fills, columns, varying font faces, layers, transparency.

But the hard part is behind them — making the decision to support open standards. The rest is just history.

View Scribd's HTML 5 example at http://www.scribd.com/documents/30964170/Scribd-in-HTML5, and a complex example of a research document converted from PDF to HTML5.