Neat idea, very poor implementation. If you try to view the examples in Google Chrome, you'll get a notice that you have to download Safari (http://skitch.com/bradgessler/dgw7p/apple-html5)
This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.
Some of the demos only work in Safari. Even a nightly Chromium snapshot does not support everything that Safari does.
I ran Chromium with my user agent set to Safari. And here's where it gets interesting.
The demos that don't work in Chromium, notably the ones that require CSS 3D transforms, get removed from the listings on the pages that have them. So for example, the "Transitions" page, only the Dissolve, Toss, Slide In, Iris and Fade Through effects show up. Unsurprisingly, those are the least technically impressive. The gallery demo in Chromium runs at a fraction of Safari's frame rate. Very choppy.
The VR demo gives you an overlay explaining that it's only supported by the iPhone browser, Safari, or another browser with 3D CSS transforms.
So I guess their demos actually detect if your browser meets the spec or not, and remove the stuff that doesn't work. I'm guessing this was the original plan -- let everyone in to show off the HTML5 tech. But then someone looked at the nerfed versions without 3D and compositing and said "that's pretty weak, we don't want that to be people's impression" or something.
> This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.
Can you, or any of the dozens of upvoters, explain the logic behind that criticism? It literally seems to make no sense to me, so I must be missing something. The page talks about emerging web standards and talks about Safari and Apple's support for them. It mentions that not all browsers support all of the latest standards, and then it gives examples of some of the latest standards that Safari supports. So, huh?
Or Chrome needs to catch up. It is "ok" on a Mac. For instance, if I see an image on a web page I can right click and copy that image and paste it into Mail....with Safari but not with Chrome.
So much for "standard". I wouldn't have expected understanding of "open" from this company, anyway. Yesterday Flash was bad, but today it's fine to write websites that only work in Safari, while using some Apple-specific HTML/CSS-tags.
Extremely lame that they check the user agent. They probably all work fine in Chrome since it uses webkit also (I believe Chrome uses a newer version even).
This is meant as inspiration, as an eye-opener, a PR move, and a gift to web developers & designers.
It does use emerging web standards. Just because some of them are not reliable everywhere does not discount that it’s all to be found in W3C and WHATWG draft specs. Note the HTML itself: They’re using <article>, <figure>, <header>. It’s really HTML5. (Remember, we consider things “standard” even before IE supports them.)
This is not meant as a compendium of current best practices. Progressive enhancement still applies in the real world. Apple knows that.
If you are criticizing this for being not cross-browser enough, you are completely missing the point.
Wow. I can only imagine what the reaction would have been if Google released this with Chrome-only demos. Lots of praise about how Google's leading the way, pushing browsers forward, and you really ought to give Chrome a try.
But when Apple does it? A barrage of complaints about how Apple doesn't support standards. It's laughable how transparently people are looking for something, anything to bitch about when it comes to Apple, no matter what they do.
Apple may not allow Java, Flash, Qt and all that on their platform unlike Google's Android(which is open to everything from anyone!). Apple might want to make sure that webkit replaces these unnecessary platforms by implementing exclusive and innovative features. And everyone is like bitching about Apple trying to be the internet monopoly and all that. I am sick and tired of all this Apple hate!
Well, Apple's page seems to emphasize HTML5 and its power, while on the other hand Google would probably explicitly brag about their Chrome browser. If Apple would rephrase the text to say something like "Look how cool Safari (and only Safari) is! You can do all this awesome stuff using HTML5, CSS etc." my reaction would be neutral or more positive.
No, because Google is not /restricting/ it. They're using the advanced features, not being bouncers deciding who to let into their party or not based on the color of their shirt.
So, when MS crippled web development for years with it's browser strategy and proprietary crap it was widely considered very harmful for the web. Now, when Apple does it, it's "pushing the web forward"?
We would all use ActiveX controls and be stuck with IE6 if everyone would think like you.
And i would argue every company would get the same "hate".
Even worse, we've all had this in the past, now we should do everything to keep things a standard and open, because we know where it leads.
Since a lot the html5 modules (and related standards) are still being worked on, we can't expect every tech demo of the new features to work in every browser.
Apple wanted to show some very shiny html5 demos and that is fine. There is a good chance that everything shown there will be working across all the major browsers in a not too distant future. (Yes they have have to loose the vendor prefix -webkit first, but that is actually the recommended way to use non-finalized preview features of the emerging standards).
I see this as Apple pushing the html5 wagon forward, the same as the other major browser vendors do. Have you tried Internet Explorer 9 Preview demos in other browsers?
Finally the html standard is moving forward again after years of standstill. How anybody can complain about that is beyond me.
+1 for Apple educating people on the awesomeness of HTML5.
-1 for being Safari-only.
Then again, when you think about it - the Safari-only filter implicitly tells people that Safari is the 'only' browser (or the best browser) currently supporting HTML5; that other browsers have to play catchup.
They explicitly say this on the front page: "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"
It seems like all the samples are targeted at the creative ad bureaus, and the goal is to educate them that HTML5 has all the features they need for their creative sites.
First the book publishers, now the ad agencies. The creative sector has really been in SteveJ's focus for the past half year.
They really open themselves up to mockery with this. Even here, in this community of people who know what's going on with W3 standards, people are finding the site confusing. Imagine the message this site is sending to the average user by putting up these cool demos that don't work on his browser:
HTML5: The standard that only works on Safari
I don't think that's the message they're trying to get across, but it's the one they're sending.
Edit: that said, imho, the original link is somewhat misguided. It brings up an interesting question: is Apple responsible for targeting all platforms, or at least all major platforms that conform to a standard? Even if those standards aren't fully implemented among different browsers? And wtf, Apple, I wanna play checkers... Some of the demos run really well on Linux though. But I mean -- are they responsible for all platforms? Or maybe they're just responsible for not misleading people into thinking that they must choose their platform? (The issues in Microsoft's antitrust history rise again.)
Anyway, for my money I don't think the future of the web is via the traditional browser -- but I'm sort of in left field in this regard. But yeah, there are maybe deeper issues that haven't really been resolved...
If browsers stick to standards then great, but as this demo proves (since it only works in Safari) you'll still need to develop for various browsers, versions, brands, types.
As I see it - I'll stick with Flash. I like the idea of write once and deploy everywhere, which worked pretty well for me until the iTouch/iPhone/iPad came along.
CSS 3D transforms are an emerging W3C spec. WebKit has the hooks for supporting CSS 3D, but a WebKit port like Chrome still needs to add an underlying scene graph engine ala Core Animation to get 3D rendering going. It's non-trivial, but possible.
Scene graph engines are hard to build, much like vector graphics engines and font rendering engines.
That said, Clutter ToolKit (the same one Chrome OS is using for its windowing manager) is about the closest open source ready-to-go replacement that can do 80% of what is needed by WebKit to do CSS 3D on top of OpenGL. It's on Google's list to add to Chrome, but not for awhile.
Google seems to be favoring WebGL over CSS 3D (too much detail to discuss pros, cons, and the politics here), and is making WebGL implementation a higher priority for now.
Does anyone know what word we're supposed to use for "Web Development techniques that help ensure a consistency of experience across browsers for all users regardless of browser choice" now that "standards" means something else?
these are experimental standards. they're being actively developed and discussed by many browser makers and the standards bodies, and will be the official standards soon.
don't hate on people trying to push the web forward. everybody is going it in a very fair, open, democratic method as trying to implement ideas as quickly as possible.
Somewhat buggy in parts on MobileSafari, though very well formatted for iPad. We certainly expect iPhone OS 4.0 for iPhone / iPod touch, but perhaps we'll see an update to iPad's version of iPhone OS as well on Monday?
Given IE's misleading page about HTML5 support, by omitting the parts they do not support to make it look like they are the market leader, Apple could have had something to gain by giving a warning that says something along the lines of "Your browser doesn't fully support the HTML5 features we're demonstrating, click here to continue, click here to experience it in Safari."
I want to see how the other browsers stack up in their demos and think it's short sided of them to not allow that to happen.
I'm still entirely unimpressed with HTML5's audio capabilities, and this 'showcase' does nothing to improve upon that. Press this button to play a 30 second sample? Browsers were capable of that in the mid nineties.
If they showed me a game with a background track and multiple layered, triggerable sounds (like just about any Flash game or iPhone game out there) I would have been a little more satisfied.
The gallery was also suprisingly sluggish on my core 2 quad machine with a somewhat super duper video card.
From a guy who did many of the examples for chromeexperiments.com and has been a pretty active promoter of HTML5/standards via three.js and other projects:
"I'm happy I rejected doing anything for this apple/html5 page. They should rethink their policy and give credits to the authors."
Tried on my iphone and iPad. The demos work at low framerate and is kind of slow. But its just a mobile device. I am not really expecting cpu intensive html5 application to work on these light devices. Thats what my macpro is for.
[+] [-] bradgessler|16 years ago|reply
This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.
[+] [-] tumult|16 years ago|reply
I ran Chromium with my user agent set to Safari. And here's where it gets interesting.
The demos that don't work in Chromium, notably the ones that require CSS 3D transforms, get removed from the listings on the pages that have them. So for example, the "Transitions" page, only the Dissolve, Toss, Slide In, Iris and Fade Through effects show up. Unsurprisingly, those are the least technically impressive. The gallery demo in Chromium runs at a fraction of Safari's frame rate. Very choppy.
The VR demo gives you an overlay explaining that it's only supported by the iPhone browser, Safari, or another browser with 3D CSS transforms.
So I guess their demos actually detect if your browser meets the spec or not, and remove the stuff that doesn't work. I'm guessing this was the original plan -- let everyone in to show off the HTML5 tech. But then someone looked at the nerfed versions without 3D and compositing and said "that's pretty weak, we don't want that to be people's impression" or something.
[+] [-] ellyagg|16 years ago|reply
Can you, or any of the dozens of upvoters, explain the logic behind that criticism? It literally seems to make no sense to me, so I must be missing something. The page talks about emerging web standards and talks about Safari and Apple's support for them. It mentions that not all browsers support all of the latest standards, and then it gives examples of some of the latest standards that Safari supports. So, huh?
[+] [-] billpaetzke|16 years ago|reply
* Apple might have limited to Safari to keep things simple--to be absolutely sure their demo would work 100%.
* I agree that it sucks that their demos are only viewable w/ Safari. But there are plenty of HTML5 demos out there for us :)
[+] [-] ptn|16 years ago|reply
(navigator.userAgent.match(/Gecko\/(\d{4})/) || [0,2005])[1] < 2005) headers['Connection'] = 'close'
[+] [-] sigzero|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buster|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haydenchambers|16 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] robertmrangel|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpcx01|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanh|16 years ago|reply
It does use emerging web standards. Just because some of them are not reliable everywhere does not discount that it’s all to be found in W3C and WHATWG draft specs. Note the HTML itself: They’re using <article>, <figure>, <header>. It’s really HTML5. (Remember, we consider things “standard” even before IE supports them.)
This is not meant as a compendium of current best practices. Progressive enhancement still applies in the real world. Apple knows that.
If you are criticizing this for being not cross-browser enough, you are completely missing the point.
[+] [-] dieterrams|16 years ago|reply
But when Apple does it? A barrage of complaints about how Apple doesn't support standards. It's laughable how transparently people are looking for something, anything to bitch about when it comes to Apple, no matter what they do.
[+] [-] Steltek|16 years ago|reply
Google has Chrome Experiments, open to everyone. Google gets kudos for letting everyone play with different browsers.
Apple has this demo, open to only Safari users. Apple gets the tut-tut'ing because it's not letting people decide for themselves.
Do you see the difference?
[+] [-] niceguy101|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciupicri|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|16 years ago|reply
Once you're suspect, you're suspect. If you've got the benefit of the doubt, you've got the benefit of the doubt.
Overall, that's probably more good then bad. We'd like to think we can be objective, but we probably can't. These crutches are there for a reason.
[+] [-] not_an_alien|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buster|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niswilsonnissen|16 years ago|reply
Apple wanted to show some very shiny html5 demos and that is fine. There is a good chance that everything shown there will be working across all the major browsers in a not too distant future. (Yes they have have to loose the vendor prefix -webkit first, but that is actually the recommended way to use non-finalized preview features of the emerging standards).
I see this as Apple pushing the html5 wagon forward, the same as the other major browser vendors do. Have you tried Internet Explorer 9 Preview demos in other browsers?
Finally the html standard is moving forward again after years of standstill. How anybody can complain about that is beyond me.
Cheers!
[+] [-] shadowsun7|16 years ago|reply
-1 for being Safari-only.
Then again, when you think about it - the Safari-only filter implicitly tells people that Safari is the 'only' browser (or the best browser) currently supporting HTML5; that other browsers have to play catchup.
[+] [-] thought_alarm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silvestrov|16 years ago|reply
First the book publishers, now the ad agencies. The creative sector has really been in SteveJ's focus for the past half year.
[+] [-] jasonkester|16 years ago|reply
HTML5: The standard that only works on Safari
I don't think that's the message they're trying to get across, but it's the one they're sending.
[+] [-] shadowsun7|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmsh|16 years ago|reply
Edit: that said, imho, the original link is somewhat misguided. It brings up an interesting question: is Apple responsible for targeting all platforms, or at least all major platforms that conform to a standard? Even if those standards aren't fully implemented among different browsers? And wtf, Apple, I wanna play checkers... Some of the demos run really well on Linux though. But I mean -- are they responsible for all platforms? Or maybe they're just responsible for not misleading people into thinking that they must choose their platform? (The issues in Microsoft's antitrust history rise again.)
Anyway, for my money I don't think the future of the web is via the traditional browser -- but I'm sort of in left field in this regard. But yeah, there are maybe deeper issues that haven't really been resolved...
[+] [-] ciupicri|16 years ago|reply
[1] http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/typography.php
[+] [-] tuxychandru|16 years ago|reply
Most of them (except VR) seem to work for me in Chrome on Ubuntu (5.0.375.55 beta).
[+] [-] dbrannan|16 years ago|reply
As I see it - I'll stick with Flash. I like the idea of write once and deploy everywhere, which worked pretty well for me until the iTouch/iPhone/iPad came along.
[+] [-] buymorechuck|16 years ago|reply
Scene graph engines are hard to build, much like vector graphics engines and font rendering engines.
That said, Clutter ToolKit (the same one Chrome OS is using for its windowing manager) is about the closest open source ready-to-go replacement that can do 80% of what is needed by WebKit to do CSS 3D on top of OpenGL. It's on Google's list to add to Chrome, but not for awhile.
Google seems to be favoring WebGL over CSS 3D (too much detail to discuss pros, cons, and the politics here), and is making WebGL implementation a higher priority for now.
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tumult|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ube|16 years ago|reply
Granted - Apple's definition of open is "you should only use Apple products".
[+] [-] alanstorm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drusenko|16 years ago|reply
don't hate on people trying to push the web forward. everybody is going it in a very fair, open, democratic method as trying to implement ideas as quickly as possible.
[+] [-] glhaynes|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crad|16 years ago|reply
I want to see how the other browsers stack up in their demos and think it's short sided of them to not allow that to happen.
[+] [-] leviathant|16 years ago|reply
If they showed me a game with a background track and multiple layered, triggerable sounds (like just about any Flash game or iPhone game out there) I would have been a little more satisfied.
The gallery was also suprisingly sluggish on my core 2 quad machine with a somewhat super duper video card.
[+] [-] not_an_alien|16 years ago|reply
"I'm happy I rejected doing anything for this apple/html5 page. They should rethink their policy and give credits to the authors."
Source: http://twitter.com/mrdoob/statuses/15417138430
[+] [-] al_james|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niceguy101|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] orangecat|16 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ugh|16 years ago|reply