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Comment by endergen | Hacker News Reader

Where the shit is any of the cool stuff. Specifically Canvas, Websockets, Local Storage, etc.

I personally find the CSS stuff less interesting as you can do a lot with clever programming to make things look great, but you can't easily emulate local storage(flash storage), canvas(flash) or websockets(comet). (emulation in parentheses, each being excessively complicated for the average developer)

Microsoft and Telcos just remind us that technological progress is bad for their personal business, which is so infuriating.

(With telcos, it's the whole thing with not just letting app developers and customers do whatever they want with their data plan and apps they use/build.

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Canvas was one of those things I was really hopeful for. Speed improvements are good - cannot test them at the moment (work machine is xp, and the dev platform is only available on vista sp2+) - but features are good, too. I guess we could write things to reduce down to SVG for IE, but that sort of defeats the purpose of a raster solution like Canvas.

Those are all HTML5 features, right? We've gotten into this weird place where the standards are being implemented while they are still in flux because the browser makers are just anxious to add new features.

True, but it's a big improvement over browser makers rolling their own solutions.

How many different version of CSS Gradients are out there now? It seems like they still just roll their own, but now they do it in an "accepted way" by using a prefix like "webkit" or "moz" on their new stuff. It doesn't do much good for the implementers though.

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work.html

As you can see CSS3 is very far from being "finalized" so any implementation that mozilla or webkit or someone does is just their best guess at what the final standard will be or experiments to provide recommendation. They leave the prefix free version for when they actually know what it is they are implementing to cause less pain in the long term allowing developers to know full well that what they are using is far from finished.

That's an old Microsoft talking point, right?

Microsoft themselves added HTML5 features to IE8, and have more planned for IE9 so saying they're HTML5 isn't in itself a valid reason not to bother implementing them.

Some people believe that independent implementations of standards can uncover areas that are unclear or impossible and make the standard much better from the experience gained. Microsoft are notable in complaining about this in standards that threaten their profits while at the same time just doing their own thing in code and later trying to get it standardised, warts'n'all. It is more than a little hypocritical.

We've always been in that place. As Mark Pilgrim put it: "Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction." -- http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-a...

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