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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Apple wants to show that you can do kick ass stuff on iPads, iPhones and Macs without any of that Flash crap (sort of paraphrasing Apple here, not necessarily my opinion).

That’s probably their intention, not showcasing interoperability or openness. Those two words do their little buzzword duty and that’s that. (I’m really not all that irate about that. It’s a cheap shot at Flash but many – probably all – of the things Apple uses in their demo actually will be a interoperable and open standard in the near future and all those evil browser prefixes will be dropped.)

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That would be a good theory if their page wasn't titled "HTML5 and web standards." There's not much room for interpretation in that.

I suspect that they simply let their desire to make the demos really impressive distract them from the original point of the demos. They could, I imagine them thinking, make some cool demos that would work in Chrome and Firefox and Safari, or they could make some even cooler demos that showed off things only available in Safari, and have a nice way to promote Safari to boot.

The problem is, once they did that, it went from a showcase of HTML5 standards to a showcase of proprietary Safari features that might be standards eventually. Oops. I'm rarely critical of Apple, but this is one of those times that makes me wonder if anyone there had their brains turned on.

HTML5 and nice-sounding-buzzword.

That’s something you can do. I don’t think it’s nice of them to throw around buzzwords while being so completely irony resistant, it’s just that I don’t think it’s a reason to be greatly angered.

I'm not greatly angered and I doubt anyone else is. It just strikes me as stupid, that's all.

My interpretation is Apple wants to influence what the final standard is going to look like. This is their vision for it which is largely based off the current W3C working draft. What's wrong with that? That's how the process is supposed to work. Apple has a few features not presently in the working draft that they want to see in the final standard. Here's the demo and you can get the WebKit source code to see how it works. The W3C, which Apple is a member of, may ratify it as part of the standard or they may not. I don't think there's any indication it will effect WebKit's ability to follow the final standard.

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