The Edge of HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

The Edge of HTML5

html5-demos.appspot.com

74 pointstilt24 comments

I realize this presentation was made for personal use on a specific browser, but it makes me sad anyway.

I was reading HN on an iPad and couldn't even read the slides. This shit happens all the time, and it's very annoying when you don't have a laptop in reach. There's an amazingly capable browser on every modern phone/tablet and yet they're left out of some content for no reason (and they even use webkit too).

Requiring IE10 to showcase IE10's new abilities makes sense, but this isn't a demo. Is it the edge of HTML5 or the edge of Chrome?

That presentation wouldn't even have worked in the latest edition of Firefox.

But it is important to understand that you need an uptodate browser to view webpages today. Gracefully handling obsolete browsers is what got us into this mess in the first place (actually it was allowing anything less than completely correct pages -- you can't have syntax errors in your c code and expect it to compile, why should your HTML be any different).

Would the web have thrived if browsers only accepted perfect html?

No.

I can't see why it wouldn't. A clear and simple error message would allow people to fix it.

Do you mean that the latest version of Safari on iOS 5, released a couple months ago, is an obsolete browser? It is amazingly easy to make a page like that work in every browser made since 1996. And it does work on Firefox, albeit very slowly.

Things like this presentation are the actual reason we got into "this mess". Making your pages accessible to everyone is a necessity. I don't mean to be impolite, but you need to revisit your concepts. HTML5 is all about gracefully handling mark-up errors in a consistent way, not the opposite. HTML is originally a language for authors, not programmers. You're thinking of XHTML vs HTML, and that's a completely different matter.

That depends on what features it supports, but a few months is quite a long time ago in browser development.

On the other hand ie9 is already obsolete.

And how exactly does HTML gracefully handle a lack of canvas?

As a webdeveloper I hope this won't be the future:

  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

This might be the edge of HTML5, but is regression of the internet. Remember the "This site should be viewed in IE5 or higher"? I hated it back then, I hate it now.

That hasn't changed, browsers just indicate it by crashing these days...

Browsers will always be at different points on feature support. If they weren't they would all be stagnating and I don't think that is a great future either.

That's a Chrome Frame opt-in. Its only effect is to instruct an installation of IE with Chrome Frame installed to switch over to Chrome Frame for these sites.

That said, I do think Chrome Frame is a bad idea because it hijacks one browser and turns it into a weird hybrid instead of just encouraging the use of Chrome in the first place.

its only used in cases where the installation of chrome is not available, or features based on proprietary VBScript attributes that are only available in IE are needed on other sites.

I find Eric Bidelman's HTML5 decks very useful. I understand the complaints. I occasionally read HN on my iPad and some links aren't tablet friendly.

These presentations are meant for developers and it's safe to assume that anyone experimenting with HTML5 will have access to Chrome, even if it's not their go-to browser.

Honeeey, I just bought you this new computer with an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processor so you can watch those HTML5 demos with more than 5 pictures per second.

Quite poor usability on touch screens like iPad.

Quite poor usability on desktop as well, not really the best advertising how to use HTML5...

Opening this presentation pegs my Firefox 9 at 100% CPU. What the hell?

-webkit-cross-fade seems pretty unnecessary. Just putting the second image over the top of the first with variable opacity accomplishes precisely the same thing.

I wouldn't be so fast in dismissing it, I just checked and it actually does more than simply putting an image over another: The cross-fade function correctly handles opacity and different image sizes. Plus it allows for easy use with CSS transitions.

"the start image has a global alpha applied to it equal to (1-p), the end image has a global alpha applied to it equal to p, and the end image is then composited over the start image with the source-over operation." (see http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-css3-images-20110217/#cross-fad...)

There are many people working on the Web specs from various groups, and they are very critical. Anything that's added to a draft will undergo a lot of review so you'd be hard pressed to find something glaringly useless.

As specced, that’s actually incorrect then. The porter duff “over” operation is identical to what’s used in browsers for regular painting of semitransparent layers (or as another example, Photoshop’s “normal blend mode”). If the below pixel A is entirely opaque, and the above pixel B has opacity P, then the color of each pixel can be computed as (1 - P) * A + P * B. If however you apply a global alpha to the below image beforehand, you get something that isn’t a cross-fade at all, and in fact isn’t even fully opaque.

[edit: When I think about this a bit more, there is one time when cross-fade is useful: For cross-fading between two semitransparent images. In that case though, what’s wanted is not really a compositing operation at all, but rather a straight linear interpolation between the respective RGBA components of the two images.]

I don’t at all believe that people working on the color and graphics aspects of web specs are sufficiently critical. In general, those aspects have been quite under-specced, and browser implementations have been incomplete and buggy. Things are improving little by little, but to take one example, there is still no proper color management of CSS/HTML colors in any browser except Firefox, and I believe it’s still turned off by default there.

I'm still wondering when did Firefox completely fall off? It seems like the best demos for HTML5 capabilities are all done on Chrome.

Black screen on iPhone 3G.

Not a very bright future.

What version of IOS are you running?

4.2.1 which is as far this phone will go.

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