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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

You really should actually watch it before passing judgement. It does not seem to compile down to <canvas> -- it may use it for some bits, but they emphasize that CSS transformations and transitions are being used in a few different key places. It seems that it really does use HTML5, not just a canvas.

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I'd have to agree, I was pretty impressed. I paused it in a couple of instances when they were showing the HTML source view and I didn't see any canvas tags. Obviously they could be added dynamically via JavaScript, but that doesn't seem to be the case as you've said. And to back up your statements, they did stress CSS transformations and there is a DOM view which clearly shows him editing DOM elements which when matched with the source code view implies pure HTML. My hope would be that they'd leverage jQuery to handle the actual dirty work of doing the transformations and focus on the tooling and timeline, though I'd imagine it's too early to know if that's case or they'll be rolling their own scripts.

I'm actually surprised someone hasn't made a tool like this for jQuery. I know jQuery and jQueryUI have basic animation support and likely some plugins that build and extend those features, but a dedicated tool for creating advanced timeline and event based animations would be amazing.

Until we get rid of most IE versions, we can't really reliably produce animation in web applications. I have built a very simple image cross-fade effect. I most of my time making it IE compatible.

I would guess it depends what type of animation you're trying to tackle. jQuery has some pretty slick animation capabilities and it supports IE 6.0+.

My point, though not complaint, was that it's more geared towards executing a single animation against a single DOM element or a group of DOM elements. This is incredibly powerful, but when you want to start chaining animations, or "firing" off additional animations when you're mid cycle on your first animation - it gets tricky.

For example doing something like...

$("#myDiv").animate({top: 50}, 1000, function(){ $("#myDiv").animate({left: 50}, 1000) });

Would move "myDiv" down from 0 to 50 over 1 second and then move it right from 0 to 50 over 1 second. But if I wanted to trigger the left -> right animation midway between the top -> bottom animation there isn't an easy way to do that as far as I know. Currently you'd have to create two top -> bottom animations and split up the distance and duration so you can interject the secondary animation.

$("#myDiv").animate({top: 25}, 500, function(){ $("#myDiv").animate({left: 50}, 1000); $("#myDiv").animate({top: 50}, 500) });

That or just execute the 2nd one with a timeout independent of the first...

$("#myDiv").animate({top: 50}, 1000); window.setTimeout($("#myDiv").animate({left: 50}, 1000), 500);

Neither of those "solutions" are terribly difficult, but it gets more and more complex when you start building on it. If Adobe's EDGE or another set of tools would give you the ability to do this easily, I'd happily pay for it. Anyway, I suppose I'm getting off topic. :)

My issue was this: when I have set the ocacity/trasnparency of an element, in IE6 it did not effect the child elements, which was a real pain to fix. I also had very hard time with aligning elements on top of each other and avoiding CSS rules that behave differently in IE and non-IE browsers.

TL;DR: Doing animations in web applications is hard for all the wrong reasons.

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If you click the link you can watch the video. I don't think they are preventing you from watching.

Edit: If you're not running Flash, you're preventing yourself from watching. Or Apple is. Either way, Adobe is offering you both the content and the decoder for free.

Apple gets the press, but there is no Flash on 98% of cellphones in the wild. Or IE8 64-bit. Or Linux in 64-bit. What about people who only own a cell phone (VERY common in other countries)? What is Adobe offering them? Stop assuming everyone is a rich technophile.

It’s an optional plugin, unavailable on many devices and in 64-bit browsers. Do you know which I’m using? In fact, a non-technical user just today was telling me that they can’t use YouTube in Internet Explorer because, in their words, “It says to install Flash. But then it says something about unavailable in 64-bit.”

Isn’t this the whole point of Adobe starting to make tools that don’t require Flash? Going from 90%+ to 100% (of browsers)?

So Adobe talking about their HTML5 future while failing to

1. Link to a movie file,

2. Use HTML5 video, or

3. Provide a text equivalent

is head-in-the-sand oxymoronic activity that does prevent some users from viewing it.

It is quite humorous that they demo it with Flash only. Maybe they should have made their page using their own HTML5 video widget they just released? =)

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