Apple's HTML5 and Standards Gallery Not Standard 527
snitch writes "Apple has created an HTML5 Showcase that presents its vision for the next generation of the WWW. The fact that this page is only accessible using the Safari browser, while Apple advocates about web standards, has caused many to criticize the company's lack of broader platform support. The showcase demonstrates several HTML5 capabilities and features that have to do with video, typography, transitions, audio, etc. Further, on the front page the company states that 'Standards aren't add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.' The latter statement falls short by the fact that the featured examples only work with the Safari browser, and in the case of the CSS 3D transforms demonstration, require Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Safari PC or plain Leopard won't do)."
Shows why HTML5 is not ready to replace flash (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Select the Typography demo
2) Select "Pincoya Black fonts"
3) Enter a couple of lines of lower case "o" (they are underlined)
4) Rotate slowly so you see the step by step motion
What you'll see: spacing between each "o" varies at each rotation step, and you can see "steps" in the underlining. That wouldn't happen with flash.
Basically while the fonts are anti-aliased, the position of each letter is computed as an integer. In flash, every coordinate is computed in floating point.
Welcome back to pixel world.
Re:some works in firefox with user agent switcher (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah but not fully, when viewing a video example under WebKit nightly I got a perspective switch that was not event present in Safari 4.
I really recommend downloading Safari 4 or even WebKit nightly (sorry Chrome users, no transform3D for you) and trying those demos, it is pretty neat, something to get really exited about.
Oh, and as for the QuickTime thing on windows machines, Safari uses it to handle html5 media playback, same as iTunes uses it for its media.
Re:It works in Safari... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say Microsoft 2.0 is quite to the point.
Re:Standards and "Standards" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Selling mine (Score:4, Interesting)
What DRM? Do you have movies on it from the iTunes store?
Re:Chrome (Score:4, Interesting)
Good lord let's get some universal standards in place, no matter what the hell they are.
Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
The hypocrisy can be summed up on that single page:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains why iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad do not support Flash and why open standards are the future of the web.
This demo was designed with the latest web standards supported by Safari. If you’d like to experience this demo, simply download Safari.
The next keynote should just have two massive murals of Stalin flanking the podium while Big Brother Steve tells you what you'll be allowed to do with your own equipment. And when he announces that they are no longer preventing you from running certain applications, that will become a feature. I guess he did learn a thing or two from Mr. Gates.
How dare Apple advertise their own products! (Score:5, Interesting)
Shock! horror! Apple are using their own website to push Safari and claim that their own browsers are ahead of the game on standards support? The bastards!!!
In large friendly letters on the page in question (my emphasis):
The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.
Note how that doesn't say "Here's a handy resource to allow you to objectively compare different browsers' HTML 5 implementations"? That is because you are looking at an advert [wikipedia.org] for Safari! As is traditional in these "adverts" it is trying to get you to download and try Safari, not find out how close the competition comes. In other news, if you go to a Mercedes dealership they're not going to offer you test drives in a BMW...
Wake me up if anybody smart enough to spoof their browser ID finds out whether Apple's demos use undocumented or non-standard features (rather than ones which don't work in Firefox, yet).
Re:Standards and "Standards" (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Selling mine (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not DRM.
The device is vertically integrated, and tied to iTunes, but DRM is a very specific term that relates to the "protection" of media content.
But it's ok, because copyright infringement is the same as piracy right? It's ok to play fast and loose with the definitions when it suits you.
Re:Missing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Chrome (Score:4, Interesting)
Criticizing Apple for making a showcase of what they can do with standards not comply with standard browsers is trolling?!
How does it not comply with standards? Sure it filters users by agent string, but lots of Web sites do that. It's not non-standard at all.
What does Apple have to do for fanboys to realize that they are just another GenericBigCompany(tm) who will rape you to death if they thought it'd add 1% to their quarterly bottom line?
This is the strawman logical fallacy paired with the implicit statement fallacy. You implicitly state in your question that fanboys don't realize Apple is simply profit minded. Since no one but you made that statement, it's just a strawman.
We're talking about Apple's demo of some new portions of the spec that are in the process of becoming a standard. Sure they want to do that because it will profit them in the long run, but the organic farmer down the street only works in the field because it will profit him in the long run. Just because someone is working for a profit does not mean what they're doing is "evil" or not beneficial to me, or for that matter that I don't realize they're working for a profit.
Re:Chrome (Score:4, Interesting)
chromium-browser --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7"
You have to change the user agent string, for any of it to work. There is no GUI method for doing so with Chromium. Modify as needed if you're on a Microsoft operating system.
Re:Missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a demo of Safari's HTML 5 capability. Of Course you need safari to use it.
Frankly that's the equivalent of Microsoft doing an HTML4 showcase on IE6. If you're locking out other browsers you're indeed missing the point of what a standard is for.
Re:A very nice HTML5+CSS3 demo that actually works (Score:3, Interesting)
Works fine on Opera, but whats impressive about it? It does not have a preloader nor transitions nor custom design. Flash can do the same since flash 5?
And you've been able to do the same thing with Silverlight and numerous other plug-ins... not with native HTML. That's what is impressive. Functionality using standards and not proprietary plug-ins.
HTML5 is not the future, it's a probable future, really really think if you'd like to support HTML5 when this show[sic] us that Apple have an agenda there, You think the web will be "more free (tm)" if Apple gets to decide what is a standard?
Apple has an agenda? What agenda is that, beyond making HTML5 more functional and useful for media and Web apps? And how does Apple decide what is the standard when they're one of several major companies contributing to the creation of it? You might as well say it's Google or Mozilla deciding the standard, as that has just as much support.
Re:Standards and "Standards" (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a demo designed to show off HTML5 and also promote Safari.
It was Webkit-specific CSS, which is a little funny in a demo designed to show off full web standards, but targeted engine CSS is not unique. One of the benefits of stylesheets is you can send specific CSS to different browsers. If the demo were tuned to Firefox, it would easily have delivered Gecko-specific CSS instead. As it is, they decided to use a user agent block, which was not all that great (the bulk of the talk is about the block, rather than the demo), when they should have just warned that the demos might fail on other browsers.
A properly designed website won't need to say "requires Safari or better" it'll just give the right stylesheet to the right browser. As long as they all support the (eventual) final HTML5 standard (and appropriate CSS), you can tailor a site to your browser.
Perhaps the ultimate goal is platform independence, but even with CSS2 and HTML4 that was just never on the cards.
Should there be engine-specific CSS? Ideally no, but all of the engines have it. It's up to the site designers themselves how they use the tools they have though - you don't have to use the specific stuff.
In the case of this demo, it might just be stopgap while they work on the generic html5 implementation - on the other demo someone posted below, Safari has some trouble with a couple of the generic ones, usually related to external borders. Who knows. It's all a bit up in the air until everything is finalised.
Re:A hard choice (Score:3, Interesting)
What Apple should've done is written something like Microsoft's IE9 HTML5 demos [microsoft.com] that actually work in multiple browsers, and maybe just linked to it from their developer portal.
Umm, Apple does link to all of these without the user agent filtering from their developer site. They also just posted these so Safari users could come take a look.
I suspect they've tried to be too clever and shot themselves in the foot in this little 'standards' skirmish...
Actually they tried to be open and cutting edge, but people with a chip on their shoulder insist on bashing them here, although I'm not sure why. The number of slanted summaries and absurdly negative interpretations make me wonder if it is an astroturf campaign.
Mozilla needs to fix their HTML5 support (Score:3, Interesting)
It was odd seeing a Mozilla dev talking about them fully supporting HTML5. They may support almost as many features, but they all run like ass. Seriously, most HTML5 demos I see on Firefox aren't unusable because some feature isn't implement, but that they are just far too slow.
Safari's and Chrome's JavaScript engines are running circles around Firefox right now. I don't know why anyone interesting in HTML5 would even bother with Firefox. WebKit is eating their lunch.
Re:Standards and "Standards" (Score:3, Interesting)
Why can't I just drop my game's C code into an HTML wrapper and have it work? Is your "better" UI in flash better than a native widget set provided by the OS your app is running on?
Also, I assume your Flash app is going to "run" on those android phones with no flash support, right?
We're not arguing that Apple is strongly vertically integrated - this is clearly the case, but you data is free to move in and out.
Your core C code is portable - you can take it right over to Android, and just connect it up to native UI widgets. For your email you just take your mbox files with you if you don;t want to use Apple's Mail app any more (unlike, say Outlook .pst files). If you don't want to use iWork all your files are easy to convert since they are fully documented XML files (unlike, say .docx), if you don't want to keep using iTunes for your music you can just move it to any music software that supports AAC (an open standard that Apple does not control).
This HTML5 demo is DEMONSTRATING WHAT SAFARI CAN DO WITH HTML5, which is why YOU NEED TO USE SAFARI - it is not a generic HTML5 demo suite for your browser of choice - there are plenty of those out there. You're trying to equate this demo page with some overarching "Apple wants to close off the web" mantra, which is simply not the case.
You can view the page by changing the UA string, but some of the demos might break. That was not the intent of the demo - the purpose is to show what Safari can do with the state of it's HTML5 support to this point (as far as possible with the draft standard).
Re:Chrome (Score:4, Interesting)
The site can't break standards because there isn't a standard to break yet for HTML5/CSS3. All it really is just Apple showing what they think the standard should look like. However, it doesn't seem to stop Apple from claiming that their version is the "standard".