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Comment by pedrokost | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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?

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).

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.

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