OK, this is the post that contains everything that everyone on the inside of the browser market knows, but doesn’t say out loud. It’s time for someone to expose the emperor. It’s a shame that the main victim here turns out to be Apple, given that the king of these tactics is Google, but hey, Apple managed to come out with something that was so brash and misleading it deserves a good tear-down. (Google at I/O managed to take native client and the Chrome Store and make it all sound like it was part of html5 – it was beautiful. But that’s for another post on another day.)
First, let’s start with the awesome dichotomy. You start with this:
My god, what a beautiful thing. They are the web. I love that. I could have written it myself. I should have written it myself.
That classic Apple dark headline and light grey subtext that everyone loves. And the text: standards, CSS, JavaScript, web designers, puppies and rainbows. Who could possibly disagree with that? From a marketing perspective, it’s beautiful – non-specific, feels good, it means that Apple loves the web, and loves you.
But how do they prove it?
That’s right. If you’re not on Safari, then Fuck You.
Aside from the incendiary language I’ve used to help you understand how it feels the real underlying message here is that if you don’t have access to Safari then you must not have access to HTML5. Wait, only Safari supports HTML5??
Nope, lots of browsers do. A huge percentage of the world does have access to standards like HTML5. Today. In fact, given the page says html5, you might ask, who has the best html5 support across the browsers right now? Not Safari. Not Chrome. The browser that also happens to have a lot of market share – Firefox:
(The best overall site that gives you useful information for this stuff is actually one that a lot of people don’t use, but should: caniuse.com lovingly maintained in his own time by Alexis Deveria)
Of course, the big problem is that html5 has come to mean a lot of things, mostly thanks to Google. They’ve basically been riding that and flogging it and making it their own. (That and performance – simple, great marketing messaging. I appreciate it, even if the dishonesty of it makes my blood boil.)
And I’m sure that this entire apple site is a result of exactly the same problem we’ve been struggling with at Mozilla as of late. This is best described by a recent experience that we had from a candidate that came in to interview. He asked:
Hey, are you guys ever going to support html5?
Like, what? Are you fucking kidding me? Truth that marketing works. The perception-to-reality gap is giant.
I’m sure this was Apple is having exactly the same problem. Basically they are saying internally “omg, no one thinks we support html5, we need to prove them otherwise! We’ll put up tests! Demos! The world will then know and we can go back to being perceived as actually leading the WebKit project which is also made of puppies and rainbows!”
So you end up with sites like this. Sites that entirely miss the point of the web, interoperability, standards and html5. The demos that they put up are just filled with stuff that Apple made up, aren’t part of HTML5 and are only now getting to the standards process. Part of CSS3? Kind of, sort of, but under heavy development and still in a feedback process.
Let me be clear. I’m being snarky here essentially to get your attention. Because this is actually important. And if there’s one paragraph you should read here it’s this one:
The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability. Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you’ll see it throughout their marketing for IE9. (Their marketing phrase is “same markup” – watch for it and you’ll see it everywhere in their messaging.) The idea that the same markup, even with mistakes, will be rendered exactly the same. HTML5 represents the chance for browsers to work together and find common ground.
Before people misunderstand me, this is different than the question of how we innovate in browsers. Standards are part of that process, but standards follow more often than lead. HTML5 contains lots of new stuff that isn’t in IE, so it looks innovative, but most of HTML5 is like breathing to Mozilla. We’ve been doing that stuff for years. We’re more interested in what’s next at this point.
But it’s unfortunate, and I guess inevitable, that browsers would compete on how much html5 they are bathed in. But it’s important to ask: when you see someone making a claim, what does it really mean? Is that a made up test by a vendor? A demo of something that goes well beyond the standards that exist? (Tons of room for that, but it should be labeled as such!) Is it a test that is designed to show off other browser’s bugs in a meaningful and constructive way? Does the person running the tests know what they are doing and respond to constructive comments?
Apple’s messaging is clearly meant to say “hey, we love the web” but the actual demos they have and the fact that actively block other browsers from those demos don’t match their messaging. It’s not intellectually honest at all.
Since you made it this far I’ll make a promise. I can’t go back and fix the past, but I can help propose a new future. I personally end up driving a lot of the messaging that comes out of Mozilla (although maybe I won’t be after this post!) I promise that:
- I’ll be as honest as I can be about what we’re doing, what it means to other browsers and even to the new darling brand of the web: html5.
- I’ll work to make sure that demos that Mozilla does work in as many browsers as possible, even with graceful fallback.
- Demos or messages that are meant to show off stuff that’s not part of any standards process at all will be labeled as such.
HTML5 is in a dangerous place since everyone wants to own it, but everyone is in a different place in terms of support or even what it means. I can’t promise what other organizations will do, but I can at least say what I will do in the future. At Mozilla, intellectual honesty matters and it matters to me personally. So I don’t think you’ll see us do things like this in the future. To us, the web and its users matter more than any particular standard or browser. And you’ll see that reflected in messaging that comes from me and shows up as marketing.
I thought that the most dishonest part in Apple’s “HTML5-demo” – which cannot be refuted by any of that “it was actually a Safari demo”- argument – was easily:
“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.”
Classic Apple – putting their KHTML-fork above the rest with just few words.
I re-read the article a couple of times and I would like to apologize and retract my stupid comments I clearly did not understand your point. Sorry.
@arw, “I don’t understand the hoopla around Apple requiring Safari for their HTML5 demo.”
Because 1) it isn’t HTML5, and 2) web standards are supposed to work on more than one browser.
Remember, this page is a showcase of Apple’s products based on the not completely baked HTML 5 standard – it is not a general HTML 5 showcase.
From the site:
“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.”
(asterisks added by me for emphasis)
I think you’re (perhaps unintentionally) twisting the purpose of the html5 page on apple.com.
And some in the comments are missing the point about the webkit vendor prefixes.
The reason that these properties are implemented using the -webkit- prefix is because these standards have not reached candidate recommendation status and are still subject to change.
A vendor prefix doesn’t mean “proprietary”—it means “experimental”. Once the standard reaches final recommendation status, which can only occur once two independent implementations have been created, then the vendor prefixes can be dropped.
Apple have always been dishonest marketers. This might be a new low and it surprised me. It’s really my fault, “Fool me once…”.
If Apple’s marketing zealots had their way they would destroy the web. They’re trying…
I think the real point is that the web has gone nowhere in over a decade. All this noise about standards and XHTML5 etc. has stopped people thinking about some major issues. Like:
1) X/HTML should have a lot in there, but nobody even talks about it. (An inbuilt heirachical navigation widget, links to the HTML editor of your choice (not another buggy JavaScript editor kludge), browser side smart includes, smart image and scene creation, choice of programming language…)
2) The browser hasn’t gone very far. There’s so many things some of us want to do. I keep seeing things that come out of who knows where (focus groups?) and that are no use to me. We really need a browser that is highly open to any programming framework/s that I want to use. That can just be integrated into the workflow that I want without pain, quickly, efficiently… The mindsets and demeaning attitude to users that I see in the current crop are holding our species back.
Yes we need to highlight the mental poisoners. Yes we need interoperability (eventually). We certainly could do with intellectual honesty. (Heck even an instant demise of those aren’t.)
But above all we need progress, systems that can do what people actually want, where we can unbolt stuff that wastes processor cycles on our machines, that we can seemlessly incorporate into the workflow that we want.
> Nope, lots of browsers do. A huge percentage of the world does have
> access to standards like HTML5. Today. In fact, given the page says
> html5, you might ask, who has the best html5 support across the
> browsers right now? Not Safari. Not Chrome. The browser that also
> happens to have a lot of market share – Firefox:”
>
> (table of pure bullshit)
I was enjoying your article up until that table seeming to show Firefox has the “best” HTML5 support, when I realized you’re use the same dishonest marketing bull that you’re accusing Apple of. Except that Apple’s case is technically correct, they do have slightly better support for HTML5 and CSS 3 feature lists.
In the “Present” row of your table, both Firefox and Safari are tied at 90%. This is good, shows that both browsers are run by people who take these standards seriously. But this only covers the markup side of things; CSS3, the graphical side of things, is equally important. Go to that same web site you linked to and check both “HTML5 and “CSS3″, and guess which browser now comes out ahead? Safari beats Firefox 88% to 78%. Not that 78% is bad; CSS3 is still a moving target and supporting over 3/4 of it in a shipping browser is commendable. But you can hardly claim to be “best” when you’re in second place.
And even in your HTML5-only comparison, the “Past” and “Far Past” rows in your table are complete and utter bullshit. Firefox 3.5 is listed as “Past” with 83% yet it was released June 30, 2009, nearly a month *after* Safari 4.0 came out with 90% (June 8, 2009). Firefox was trailing here! Yet you’re comparing it to Safari 3.2, an older version released over seven months earlier with 50% support. That’s dishonesty. In an article accusing Apple of dishonesty, that’s also hypocrisy.
Firefox 3.0 came out about halfway between Safari 3.1 (a Windows port of 3.0) and 3.2 (the real update). Of course you’re comparing it to 3.1.
(The placement of Chrome is even more ridiculous. Its “Past” and “Far Past” versions were both released in 2010, after the most recent versions of Safari and Firefox.)
Please don’t pull a Microsoft and cherry pick your data to pretend you’re the most standards-compliant browser around. Speak honestly to us about what you’re doing to continue innovating, point out that 78% of HTML5+CSS3 is a great achievement being that they’re both moving targets, and maybe even dig on Apple for using a few proposed CSS3 features in their demos that Apple themselves created (and offered up as standards) but haven’t been supported in other browsers yet. But here you’re just acting like Microsoft.
Oops, I made a mistake in my previous comment. Chrome 3.0 (\Far Past\) was released in in October 2009, between Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6. Chrome 4.0 was released after Firefox 3.6.
And here’s your HTML 5 support table ordered by browser release date. Note where Safari 4.0 falls, as opposed to where it’s placed in your table:
(Sorry if the formatting comes out jumbled.)
Safari 3.1 25% March 18, 2008
Firefox 3.0 46% June 17, 2008
Safari 3.2 50% November 13, 2008
Safari 4.0 90% June 8, 2009
Firefox 3.5 83% June 30, 2009
Chrome 3.0 88% October 12, 2009
Firefox 3.6 90% January 21, 2010
Chrome 4.0 90% January 25, 2010
“Who has the best html5 support across the browsers right now? Not Safari. Not Chrome. The browser that also happens to have a lot of market share – Firefox.”
Wow. Who’s being intellectually dishonest now? Not only does that chart show equal support, but _other_ online tests (of admittedly questionable accuracy) score FF well below Safari and Chrome.
And what about CSS3? FF certainly isn’t winning that match.
So…pot meet kettle?
I see some debate about who has best support.
That seems to be based on a “tick the boxes” count.
I’ve never really understood why people buy that. I know it’s an easy thing to do but I find it can be very wrong.
When I evaluate; I take the features. Figure out which ones I need myself. Rate those and tot them up.
That way any things which I’ll never use don’t feature.
I imagine that all these “90%” compliant type statistics are misleading to other people too.
Across a broad range of real developers something similar could be done. Using a realistic survey for a real project or two.
This article is definitely not sour grapes – I felt goofily mislead and sort of pissed when I went to the demo from Firefox.
Peculiar at best.
@Rich C
The problem now and maybe even in 10 years, will that be the same 90%?
@Mr Lizard
“Remember, this page is a showcase of Apple’s products based on the not completely baked HTML 5 standard – it is not a general HTML 5 showcase.”
Really! Then why is it called “HTML5 Showcase” and not “Safari CSS3 Showcase”? Because it hardly uses ANY HTML5, and only works in Safari.
I thought open web standards were supposed to be open. Apple is spitting open web standards in the face by treating them like their own walled garden.
@Rich C
“I was enjoying your article up until that table seeming to show Firefox has the “best” HTML5 support, when I realized you’re use the same dishonest marketing bull that you’re accusing Apple of. Except that Apple’s case is technically correct, they do have slightly better support for HTML5 and CSS 3 feature lists.”
This is just dishonesty on your part.
It’s supposed to be a *HTML5 Showcase*! Why are you talking about CSS3? CSS is not part of HTML.
The fact is that Apple’s “HTML5 Showcase” hardly uses any HTML5 at all. More dishonesty from Apple.
@Justin
“_other_ online tests (of admittedly questionable accuracy) score FF well below Safari and Chrome”
Other online tests that don’t just test HTML5?
They are useless. You even admit that they are of “questonable accuracy”. Well gee, of course they are! If they are testing anything but HTML5, they are not showing the actual HTML5 support!
Hear hear…. Even as a Designer and Apple user, their marketing is increasingly irritating me.
I was annoyed with “revolutionary and MAGICAL”… used to describe a piece of TECHNOLOGY… as in “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic.” – Arthur C Clarke. So that’s what Apple thinks of it’s market? The latest shouting match/pissing contest between Apple/Adobe/Google is just another source of pain for the professional Creative, mostly felt in our wallets and more hassle with persuing our trades.
This latest thing from Apple, using the User/Agent tag to block all non Safari Browsers from content they could surely display… DICK MOVE. And just pisses me off.
@waddap:
If you’re going to accuse me of dishonesty, please actually talk about what I posted. I said nothing about Apple’s page. I said that Blizzard’s table lies through its teeth by comparing more recent Firefox versions to outdated Safari versions, even when newer major Safari versions had already been released. Safari 4.0 (90% HTML5) came out *before* Firefox 3.5 (83% HTML5), yet his table compares Firefox 3.5 to the then-outdated Safari 3.2. And he uses it to show Firefox has the “best” support for HTML5. His numbers, not including CSS3.
When you include CSS3, Safari does beat Firefox.
As for Apple’s web site, you said “It’s supposed to be a *HTML5 Showcase*! Why are you talking about CSS3? CSS is not part of HTML.”
CSS is not part of HTML? Are you kidding me? Go re-read that block of text from the very top of Apple’s web page that Blizzard quoted in this very article. It’s big and pretty and easy to read. And clearly says that it’s a demo of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
@eddie2453:
“The problem now and maybe even in 10 years, will that be the same 90%?”
Of course not. Both Safari and Firefox (and Chrome, and Opera, and hopefully even Internet Explorer) will keep on improving their respective support for standards, just as they always have. I’m sure when HTML5 is officially standardized, both Firefox and Safari will have near 100% compliance with it. IE will get there, well, whenever IE gets there. :)
My comment didn’t fit here, so I put it on my site:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/-webkit-html5/
Just a quick comment on people claiming the page is titled “HTLM5 Showcase”. It’s not. The page title is “Apple – HTML5″. It then goes on to show some features of Apple’s browsers and devices in regards to how well they support HTM5, CSS3, and javascript.
I don’t think there was a winning scenario for Apple in this. If Apple didn’t check the browser and the tests failed on other browsers, the internet drama would simply have been: “Apple chose tests to make other browsers look bad!!!! Blah, blah, blah, Apple’s evil. blah, blah, blah.”
The page IS a marketing page for Apple’s browsers and devices. The entire point of the page is to showcase Apple’s products, show you how they can do these cool things, and get you to buy/download them.
People get themselves worked up about a simple marketing page…?????
Yup, commenters have noticed this already: at the moment, Safari is a few percentage points ahead of Firefox re. HTML5 feature support.
But it doesn’t matter. Your point is completely valid.
I’ve been a supporter of Apple stuff for about 15 years, but I don’t like where they are heading at all recently.
Seriously HTML5 has become whatever we want it to be and is more a meme than a technology now. As it stands it is now a manifestation of whatever feature our team err… browser has in a new version. Case in point CSS3 has nothing to do with HTML5 but yet it is constantly named in the same breath. Many of the things IE (and Firefox and Safari) talk about as HTML5 aren’t even in the core spec, and in some cases never were. Interestingly large portions of the core spec ex. Form controls exist at best partially in Opera or not all.
If people want to call the post sour grapes – sure I buy it.
If people want to say Apple (and IE and Firefox) making up marcom nonsense to score points – I say hell yes!
Google you’ve done no end to make HTML5 a buzz word and Steve Jobs turned that hype to 11 so now we have this decades DHTML…too this day people still don’t know what that is put load the resume with it.
A great amount of what people say about it is 100% Bunk. I know I struggled and wrote a book on it [plug - HTML & CSS Complete Reference 5th edition ] and watched specs changing and browsers having god awful support of things. Even Canvas has its issues and of all the HTML5 features it is by far the most mature.
So there you have it a few of us lucky people know what it is but even those who don’t know they want it and are sure the other guys don’t really have it. I think Mr. Blizzard has his points and add we should all should take a few deep breaths before discussing HTML5.
-Thomas Powell
p.s. Touching a demo, glancing at an RSS feed post or tweet is not knowing about the spec, read or write demos of your own please. What you see is certainly not all there is to this topic. It is massive!
I think Thomas Powell’s post is well worth reading.
Remember HTML5 is a work in progress. Ian Hixon I think said it will be really done in 2022. The W3C page reveals some of the behind the scenes battles, look at this:
>>Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in implementing this specification before it eventually reaches the Candidate Recommendation stage should join the aforementioned mailing lists and take part in the discussions.
>>The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft does not imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML working group endorse the contents of the specification. Indeed, for any section of the specification, one can usually find many members of the working group or of the W3C as a whole who object strongly to the current text, the existence of the section at all, or the idea that the working group should even spend time discussing the concept of that section.
The very name HTML5 may have lost it’s meaning at the hands of “marketers”. Try it out to deepen your knowledge.
The future is unclear (for example look at the partial IE9 test graphs at http://j.mp/a3lNEG (which is about additional test pages!))
This is what I hate the most about all this Apple-if-God fad. Sick of it. This kind of crap has been going on for ages, and it’s the only reason why Flash got its momentum, and will probably still do it for so many years. As a web developer, it’s infurating to spend HOURS trying to make things match in web browsers… It doesn’t matter how many times Steve Blowjobs says it, developing for browsers regularly means build tons of hacks, reset sheets, struglle with tables vs divs, spend HOURS making things compatible, use JS frameworks and JS cutom crap, and the list goes on and on. It’s been going on since Netscape vs. IE… they competed by stepping on standards, adding fancy blink tags, and trying to innovate while taking a shit on standards. Well, guess what? Apples about to do the same thanks to all these fanboyism, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it… It won’t matter how much we bitch about it. I’ve been on the “dark side” too… I’ve done some Actionscript (read: Flash) coding as well, and guess what? It’s a beautiful language, and you spend 99% of your time enjoying coding and making amazing things instead of trying to make a DIV stay in a particular position across 20,000 browsers. So most people that talk about how Apple is opening the world to the beauties of HTML5 don’t have a clue about how is it to struggle with this crap over an over. Standards are great as an utopia, but there’s always someone taking a crap on them leaving developers struggling with annoying hacks and workarounds and in the end you get a crappy HTML page with a couple of fancy accordions and nothing else. Flash sucks for websites, true. But HTML5 is in no way a replacement… why? because even today most websites look different or don’t work the same in all browsers. Flash can be whatever you want, but at least it is consistent. If Apple fanboys, Steve Jobs, and whoever else wants to do something good for the web, then they should focus on MAKING THINGS WORK THE SAME, everywhere. I don’t care if it’s whit a plugin, Flash, HTML10, or whatever technology, but enough is enough… When I’ve coded for AS3, it’s always been a pleasure knowing “it just works”. At work, when I have to code for HTML, you get a fuzzy feeling when things take shape, except at the end when nothing works the same on any browsers… even having an object display 1 pixel away in a different browser should not happen. But, Stevey is king, and he’s taking a crap on all of us. Flash may suck in any way you like it, but the truth is… it is the best content option out there in terms of speed in development and consistency. To bad it had to end this way, and there’s no turning back. One more step back to web standards and development.
“I can’t go back and fix the past, but I can help propose a new future. I personally end up driving a lot of the messaging that comes out of Mozilla (although maybe I won’t be after this post!) I promise that:
* I’ll be as honest as I can be about what we’re doing, what it means to other browsers and even to the new darling brand of the web: html5.”
Are you going to issue a series of press releases publicly denouncing and apologizing for Mozilla’s campaign of lies (mainly at the expense of Opera), deceit (largely propagated by Aza Dotzler), and standards-incompliance (urging websites to sniff and block browsers other than Firefox) over the course of the last decade? And how about that “Best Viewed on Firefox” BS that still pollutes the web? And the promotion of old Netscape quirks and non-compliant rendering over W3C standards?
Or are you just angry and bitter that Apple’s beating you at your own game?
I’d just like to say that Apple’s demos are among the best examples I’ve seen of what should be possible on the web today. Let’s see more, working on more browsers, without extensions.
@Mike Gale: “Interestingly large portions of the core spec ex. Form controls exist at best partially in Opera or not all.”
This is pure and utter nonsense. Why are you spreading lies about Opera?
@Scott, if these are the best examples, then Flash is apparently the way to go because Apple shows that HTML5 is useless and doesn’t work across browsers.
Pablo: I do have a clue what it’s like, I’ve been doing web development since 1994. And while I do spend hours getting things to work right in IE, for the most part things have been getting better.
I rarely have problems where things don’t get positioned in the right place for my design. And the vast majority of my designs work on first test, without change, between Safari and Firefox. Internet Explorer 8 has actually been pretty good. IE 7 takes some work to get designs working in, and IE 6 is just awful.
But I hardly see why whining at Apple as you’re doing, or whining at Firefox as some other people are doing, will fix Microsoft’s problem.
And by the way, HTML was never intended for pixel-perfect visual accuracy, and that’s its strength. It was intended as a medium to share information regardless of how it is viewed. Emphasized text is italicized by convention, but when a blind user is viewing your page it can be spoken slower. People with poor eyesight can make your text bigger or override your color choices without breaking your design, at least if it’s a well designed site. Try doing that with Flash.
Scott:
Better to say they’re great examples of what will be possible on the Web when vender-specific features like these get adopted by more browsers and become real standards. They’re only useful today if you’re coding specifically for Safari, i.e. making an iPhone-specific web app.
webman: sheesh.
Okay, I’d like to see the chart updated with the “present” and adding the spec for the newly release Safari 5… just to be clear.
HTML5 is only part of the equation with CSS3 and (ack!) JavaScript as the other parts. So if this is the equation, what’s the answer? Safari 5?
@Garrr Not sure what you’re referring to. It has nothing to do with any of my posts.
Please check your posts before going live. (I know this is an emotive subject.)
I’ll stick my toe back into this one.
As a print AND web designer, I have joked with colleagues that at least when you spray ink on paper, it TENDS TO STAY THERE. But at another level, it’s not funny, I have the past few years been trying to graduate from so-called “old School” web design using tables and obsolete crud like tags to HTML/XHTML and CSS designs. All the good, but still having to fight my way through the nest of browser incompatabilites. And while FLASH is a horrid working environment unless you’ve the head to wrap around Actionscript… I still come to it again and again for the most platform consistent solution to media and video playback. And for sophisticated animation, it’s still the big kahuna, despite the improvements offerd by JQuery and the potential of HTML5 and CSS3.
But yes, the HOLY FRAKKIN’ GRAIL is to write the pages ONCE, without dodges, shims, hacks, or a pile of conditional workarounds for sick, dead, or broken browsers, and just have the pages display even REASONABLY consistently. Failing that, we still have to design for the browser installed on the Client’s (and their Bosses) machine… typically a WIN XP machine Running IE 6 or 7.
And it looks like it’s going to be engineers vs marketeers over HTML 5 as the new buzzword. And Adobe isn’t really helping by manking Flash the destination swiss-army-knife-fits-all solution to all their new interactivity features in CS5.
YOU’RE NOT HELPING.
Doesn’t it make sense, in a way, to demo your browser’s capabilities from a page that can only be viewed by that browser? Don’t get me wrong, I hate pages that are browser-blocked (Microsoft does this all the time, too), but wouldn’t showing you a standards-compliance demo not make any sense if you were viewing through a different browser? This could actually confuse some stupid people who would see the page, and interpret what they were seeing as what Apple was attempting to show off. It would be like advertising how great your HD tv looks over standard-definition cable.
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Well, I find it Ironic that I stumble across this giant flame war on one of those days I spend so much time coding HTML that the screen starts looking like an acid trip….
If you couldn’t tell from that earlier statement, my job is to code stuff into HTML; right now I’m taking PDFs and making them ‘Human readable.’ Its a bit of a pain when you’re so focused on efficient coding as I am (GAAAR, Why can’t I just have all the li’s in their own row??? Why so many returns?), and lately I’ve been looking into HTML 5. I must say… it does have some nice functionality, but frankly, we have flash. We have people who are AMAZING at flash. I’m sorry, “HTML 5 IS THE FUTURE!!!!1!!!ONE!!” really does not seem… even rational… to me.
No, I am not saying we should use Flash for basic webpages, HTML 5 will do that great, probably better than the HTML 4 I use now (although, seeing as I have always naturally been just as strict as XHTML on my coding, I’d rather have seen XHTML 2.0, or at least see it by 2012. No, it might not be so easy, but having such a strict standard means finding your problems, and fixing them, is oh, 20x easier). However, for videos and such, Flash already has such a huge lead. I’m sorry, I don’t want to have to go and see exactly how much Javascript and CSS I remember (thankfully by owning a Droid, I have a +20 equipment bonus to my Search Checks, and my +4 Int modifier sure does help too ;) ). Also, if for nothing else, we should keep Flash around for its sheer potential. Even simple, free-to-play games show exactly how much potential it has to do… well, in the right hands, it seems like Actionscript is like a Rooted Android phone: You can do anything with it; if there isn’t already something that does what you want, then you can get it programmed in, and if you can’t do that, its simply impossible. My one complaint is its stability, but hey, with the plugin-killing stuff of chrome, that proves to be less of a problem than everyone’s stereotypes (OH MacOS IS SO MUCH BETTER BECAUSE WINDOWS IS SO UNSTABLE!!! Really… I jsut wish some of those people would listen to me and get with Ubuntu already.)
And yes, Firefox is a GODLY browser. Safari doesn’t really have all that much on it (maybe now speed), but there is a reason why I have my backup as FF: For those certain things that Chrome just can’t do. (I also have Opera for when the Wifi is like the 405 freeway I take to work every day ;) )
Dumb thing to do by Apple, putting that popup forcing you to download Safari.
*Specially* because you can see the demos on any browser with graceful fallbacks on the devcenter!
http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
The popup sends mixed messages (we enforce standards vs. standards available by us)… I really dunno what they were trying to accomplish…
What about the Dailymotion HTML5 demo only viewable with Firefox…
Open video, open codec… Hm?
http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo
eM wrote:
“Are you going to issue a series of press releases publicly denouncing and apologizing for Mozilla’s campaign of lies (mainly at the expense of Opera), deceit (largely propagated by Aza Dotzler), and standards-incompliance (urging websites to sniff and block browsers other than Firefox) over the course of the last decade? And how about that “Best Viewed on Firefox” BS that still pollutes the web? And the promotion of old Netscape quirks and non-compliant rendering over W3C standards?
Or are you just angry and bitter that Apple’s beating you at your own game?”
Yep.
A lot of pixels wasted here on sour grapes.
Apple seems to have made a marketing decision. The demos on the public page are for Safari. There is a developer’s version here: http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
which will work with all WebKit browsers. The 90% is the same for all the modern versions, but there are some divergences. Google Chrome, for instance, doesn’t play all these things correctly. I’m sure, when the standard is finalized, all the browsers will, if everyone can keep hold of their spleen.
I thing the principal goal of the apple html5 demo is to say “look what we can do, even if we don’t integrate the adobe flash player.”
Another goal is to get more safari users on the web, so they made the test for only safari users with a link to getting safari if you don’t have it.
Obviously the apple’s speech is the apple’s speech, wich is made of puppies and rainbows! like always …
What about google, they propose so manythings , so many facilities like buying and offering a free patent video codec (V8) to the web community. In that way, if you disagree with a google proposition on a standard definition, it’s become more difficult to get against. By this way they can get more control at the roots of HTML5. By this way they can say that they are the HTML5 …
(I dont know if you can understand what i have writted, i’m not use to write in english)
I don’t give a crap about HTML5. I don’t want ‘video’ explanations of how to type in a command line. (Are they Kidding?) Or set up an email account. We now announce the 800 pound web browser, you can’t make a computer fast enough for this thing to work…
My captcha is “the immoral’…
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When presented with the “safari only” dialogue stopper at Apples Demo page, I noted the page URN in the status bar, and put it directly into my Linux FireFox browser— the AppleDemos I tried loaded just fine and worked.
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Interesting post, an dI definitely agree about Apple marketing strategies.
But… be careful to what you say.
Apple supporters storm like vultures.
They jump on whatever blog to protect their conducador.
Apple is not a corporation to some people, it is a religion.
Suggest you revisit caniuse.com and update your table. Firefox 4.0 is currently no longer leading Safari in features, and is actually scoring lower than Chrome 7.