Comment by tumult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tumult | Hacker News Reader

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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.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=18125

"The upstream work is not sufficient for what we will need. It is only the beginning of the work. We would need to offload compositing to the GPU."

Sounds like Apple decided to enable the existing WebKit implementation while Google is working on their own implementation. (which could very well end up back into WebKit proper at some point) This is exactly how standards in the context of friendly competition are supposed to work. You can't really expect everyone working off WebKit code to coordinate when certain features or standards support are turned on in beta or public releases.

That's fine for development, but it's simply untrue to show features in development and claim that they represent usable support for standards.

What is the purpose of showing demos that work only on Safari? How can one call this a standard? Standards should work everywhere IMO. One of the many criterion I use to define a standard is that it is widely available. Right now, Flash is more a standard than HTML5 according to this criterion. Jobs is doing what Gates was doing - locking everyone on his platform. I don't know the stats but the Safari browser share is very low (on Desktops).

The point probably being that these features are specified in the standard, but aren't implemented everywhere yet. This isn't lock in, because other browsers will presumably implement them soon(tm).

This seems to be a point a lot of people are making, but it isn't really true. Most of the features shown in these demos are not part of any web standard. HTML5 is actually not a standard, but even if it were this would still be only partially accurate.

In reality, all of the CSS transforms and effects (and plenty of other Safari features) were created by Apple without input from any of the other browser vendors or standards bodies. Some of those things have been picked up, some haven't. I actually think this is the right way to do things, and I don't want to give off the impression that I don't appreciate what the Safari team has spent the last few years doing, but I'm also not wild about letting Apple distort the picture for the sake of scoring PR points against flash (which is what this website is all about).

You don't really get to "define a standard", the W3C does. Standards are about the way the web should be, not the way it is.

The difference is between adopting open standards that others haven't gotten around to yet

versus inventing your own undocumented functionality for the purpose of making compatibility impossible.

Apple is further down the track. MS was trying to derail the train.

Making you download Safari does seem a strange choice. But then, the whole point of the page is "look how well these things work in Safari", so why not?

Nobody cares about your definition of standard.

  Standards should work everywhere IMO

By this definition we hardly have any standards. Say hello to IE6.

IE6 was the standard. It is not longer the standard because it was written in 2001. Bash IE6 all you like, normally I would join in but make sure its a valid point.

Excuse me? IE6 was a standard of what exactly? Sure it was the best browser back in 2001, it was the most popular browser for a while, so what? The point of my comment was that standard is not something that works on the browser you have, it is something that parties agree upon. How many of those bashing Apple here know that the editor of HTML5 spec (Ian Hickson) is from Google, not Apple? How many do know, that all that nifty stuff this demo shows is already submitted to W3C? How many do know, that a lot of it is already supported by Mozilla and Opera with (oh horror!) their own vendor prefixes? Alas, judging from comments a few do understand what vendor prefixes are.

I am a member of WHATWG mailing list so I can see how standards are born, and this level of misunderstanding about web standards in general and HTML5 in particular really saddens me.

Since when does a "standard" mean that it magically works across all browsers. Is HTML5 less of a "standard" because Microsoft is too lazy to implement it properly in their browser?

IE9 will support the full html5 spec. Download it and try it.

It sure doesn't right now. And I've heard that line before.

> Some of the demos only work in Safari

Which, given other browser-makers' commitment to supporting the emerging specs, just goes to show that 'standards' is a misnomer in this case. In informal usage that's OK; most of us hope that the standardisation of CSS3, HTML5 and related WHATWG initiatives will happen sooner rather than later. But misapplying the term in your marketing material (linked from the front page) is confusing and unhelpful.

Uh, what? The vast majority of the time, when people talk about web standards, they mean the W3C recommendations. Suddenly, when Apple uses it in marketing material, it means "recommendations that have been implemented by all browsers"?

Compare:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ 'W3C Working Draft 4 March 2010'

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ 'W3C Recommendation 24 December 1999'

So by 'recommendation', am I to assume you're talking about HTML 4.01?

(edit: again with the downvotes, no answer...)

Upvoted. You are correct. HTML5 is not yet even approved W3C candidate recommendation.

To be more accurate Apple should have said that it is committed in implementing HTML5 standard, not that it has done it, because at the moment HTML5 is not ready.

From Wikipedia: "Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products"

2022? Then those guys move too slow to be useful. Good on Jobs for trying to force it to move at a more reasonable pace. There is no reason to wait so long.

Ian is not saying people should wait until 2022. That quote is taken out of context.

He was saying that it is useful well before it is an official recommendation. He is a member of the WHAT-WG and Apple was one of the founding members so what he's saying is pretty much in lock-step with apple and the webkit team.

To understand the 2022 date, you have to understand what the W3C currently means by "Recommendation."

From here http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ:

For a spec to become a REC today, it requires two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations, which is proven by each successfully passing literally thousands of test cases (20,000 tests for the whole spec would probably be a conservative estimate)

The candidate recommendation phase, which WHATWG expects to happen next year is a much more relevant date. That aside I do wonder if this level of effort isn't just wasted pedantry.

Sure, I agree that 2022 sounds absurdly conservative estimate. By then all browsers will support at least HTML8 :-P

But my point was that giving impression that one company already has it all ready is stretching the truth as HTML5 is still a moving target.

haha at the rate we're going... I think we'd be lucky to see a draft of HTML6 by 2022

Many browsers still do not support full css2 support. Why should we expect full css3 support? Thats why the 2022 seems so far away. It states FULL support not partial like most all browsers currently do.

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