Adobe made a move I totally wouldn’t expect from them yesterday—they contributed an idea to the W3C for the official CSS3 specification everyone would use to validate their code. Adobe’s not engaged the web community in any meaningful way, ever, so this is a major step forward for their behavior.
The addition they proposed is a notion for “CSS regions,” which essentially defines irregular polygonal shapes and flowed text to allow for more fluid layouts on web pages. I’ve seen web-native designers charmingly calling these kinds of layouts “print-like” (as if there was anything set in stone defining online design as quadrangular).
There’s a WebKit-based browser available for download as a proof of concept over at Adobe Labs, and that’s telling too: since there’s no Flash on iOS devices, since those devices are all running WebKit, and since Adobe really needs to up the ante with Conde Nast (and, really, pretty much the entire publishing industry) since they’ve thrown so much energy, skill, and money into CS5.5 as the flagship application suite for developing online content. Finally, a major design company showing they even want to acknowledge the web.