Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

edit2: yeouch, I should have just stuck with my complaint that the page is still using Flash and canned the semantic whine. My bad.

What's "full" HTML5?

What's all devices?

Is it this?

    <div id="homeFooter" class="container_footer main_background">

That's not an HTML5 footer tag.

Oh what's this video front and center in the middle of the page?

Flash. I click on the link to the website that's gone full HTML5 on all devices and am staring Flash in the face.

I feel like I've been had. Much more so for the Flash video than the nit on semantic tags.

Edit:

Ah ha! By rolled out they meant sequestered away at http://html5.grooveshark.com, not http://grooveshark.com. They should really be linking to the HTML5 version of the site from the article. It's also the page I get when I use my phone to access the site.

There we have an audio tag, though <div id="page-header" ...> exists instead of a header tag.

Ah well, these are super minor nits at the end of the day. I'm glad for any site that is trying to get away from app stores and go native. I still feel like the term "full HTML5" is a tad vague (and not yet true).

Do you even know what HTML5 is? HTML5 doesn't enforce the use of header, section, article and all of the other tags. The tags you mention are merely for semantically marking up content and are block level elements like DIV's. The fact that Grooveshark is using things like HTML5 audio and whatnot without the reliance on 3rd party plugins like Flash to me is what HTML5 is all about.

I take "full HTML 5" to mean that it doesn't use any technologies outside of the HTML 5 umbrella (which includes CSS, JavaScript, etc.), like Flash, not that it necessarily uses every HTML 5 feature to its full potential.

Sorry, I'm really just upset that Flash is still being used on their main page (the page that the article links to). I had to go to html5.grooveshark.com to get a version without Flash.

I guess its silly of me to not take "all devices" as "all mobile devices", which is reasonable in the context of site vs appstore

I'm going to guess that you were using your computer at the time. If you're using a desktop browser you're going to be directed to the site which relies on flash. If you're in a Webkit browser you can use html5.grooveshark.com and get the html5 experience on your desktop.

On a handheld device, we automatically direct you to the html5 site when you visit grooveshark.com

You didn't answer the question. The question being asked is why - if y'all are capable of delivering an html5 grooveshark for mobile - the main grooveshark app (your flagship product) still exclusively uses flash.

Time. We are a very small team. It will happen eventually, but at least now everyone has an option.

That's a perfectly fair argument. For those who want to embrace HTML5, which flash-based features in the main site weren't ready to be ported to HTML5 due to technical limitations? As one of the few sites even trying, your use case could drive HTML5 audio.

The main site actually used to be 100% Flash (Flex). We've ported nearly everything out now but there are some algorithms that are still in there for no other reason than never getting around to porting them, but the other thing we rely pretty heavily on Flash for is cross domain communication with 3rd party services, many of them don't support or know about CORS/jsonp but getting them to add a crossdomain.xml on their site was easy. We'll probably just disable support for those services for people who don't have Flash. We'll also probably prefer to use flash whenever it is available for playback, because so far for the most part HTML5 audio is still more flaky and gives us less control over buffering/playback than Flash does...but at least the basic aspects of the site that most people care about will be able to work seamlessly whether or not you have flash. Eventually. :)

+1! Thank you for the thought out response! Seriously - your company should share it more broadly. You have a rare perspective on HTML5's audio story. Most folks have only focused on video.

I'm curious where 3rd party services come in in slightly more detail - I'd always assumed what I saw on grooveshark was a 100% client-server app. I'm assuming they're something like pulling from an album art service or a similarly ornamental interface that wasn't even worth carrying over to the mobile experience.

What's "flaky" mean? Do you mean that using it sometimes resulted in failure to deliver audio to a user with a compatible user-agent? If so, that sucks. Which browsers, any ideas what's wrong with it? If not - could you clarify?

I may strongly disagree with Grooveshark as a company, but that doesn't mean you aren't one of the only legitimate players with experience in delivering audio on the web. I am curious to hear more.

Not using all the available new semantic markup is a little different than having a site that doesn't rely on Flash to serve audio.

>It's also the page I get when I use my phone to access the site.

That's how it's supposed to be. When you go to grooveshark.com on your phone you get the html5 app, from anywhere else you get the main (flash using) site. Using html5.grooveshark.com takes you to the html5 site no matter what.

You're not the only one who's been had: much of the music on Grooveshark is shared against artists' wishes.

But entrepreneurism!

Gonna go look for my tiny violin

you don't think it's absolutely unacceptable that Grooveshark makes money off of content they don't have the rights to?

No, because it provides a useful service... It's like saying Uber is unacceptable because it may violate (the outdated) laws in New York.

are you comparing laws and copyright infringement?

Grooveshark takes content created by someone else and then profits from the distribution of that content without permission and without passing back any revenue to the rightful owner of the content. How does that compare to uber?

copyright infringement is also 'law'... so I'm comparing laws with laws.

I'm not comparing the individual actions of the companies. Only that sometimes "the law" is not useful anymore.

Which yes, I am saying that copyright needs to change, the notion of a 'rightful owner of content' needs to change. Having laws that are completely contrary to how society operates are generally doomed to fail.

I'm not sure where this type of opinion came from but it definitely has been becoming more prevalent in the last 5 years. I think it is just people are becoming more inclined to think they are entitled to someones else's creative content just because it has been easy to acquire free for years now.

Just because it is easy to copy music online doesn't mean all music should be 'free' and every artist should just abandon what many of them rely on to make a living just because you want to save some money on your entertainment.

If artists couldn't make money on selling people (the right to listen to "their") songs, would they abandon their artistry?

Is it a sense of entitlement? or is it a rejection of the monetization of culture?

It is a sense of being able feed their kids via sustainable work more than "monetization of culture".

It should be up to the musician to reject the culture of monetization and distribute their music for free, not you. Musicians shouldn't have to work another job so they can have the privilege of supplying you with music. If you value their music, you should demonstrate it to them, so they make more for you.

If no one wants to buy (the right to listen to) a song then it 's price is too high.

Given a lot of arts are heavily inspired by the culture around them, who gives the artist the 'right' to own all 'rights' to music they create

Poetry is an art that doesn't make money (compared to music), has poetry died? Just because we monetized something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

> If no one wants to buy (the right to listen to) a song then it 's price is too high.

Wait. The music industry made some 2 digit billions of dollars last year. No one wants to pay for music entertainment?

> Given a lot of arts are heavily inspired by the culture around them, who gives the artist the 'right' to own all 'rights' to music they create

Substitute your profession above for artists. Do you feel the same? Everyone is inspired from things which came before them, and yes you can profit off of your new creation which has been influenced from culture which has come before you.

> Poetry is an art that doesn't make money (compared to music), has poetry died?

It doesn't? Here is a list of the top selling books on Amazon labeled poetry: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Poetry/zgbs/books/1...

Top 3: Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Odyssey. The publishing companies who printed these books and spent the time typesetting, translating them etc aren't making money?

> Just because we monetized something doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.

This argument only seems to come up in context to books/music/movies. IE: Entertainment which you can easily get for free and think people should be compensated zero dollars for it now because of the internet. Ridiculous. Why are the people who create entertainment the only ones who should work for charity? Note: it isn't some noble cause, it is because you don't rely on that industry to put food on the table, are cheap, and can get your entertainment online for free instead.

> Wait. The music industry made some 2 digit billions of dollars last year. No one wants to pay for music entertainment?

I posed it as a question, if people are not prepared to pay for something (e.g they download it for free), it because it is priced wrong (too high). That doesn't mean all music is priced too high.

> Substitute your profession above for artists. Do you feel the same? Everyone is inspired from things which came before them, and yes you can profit off of your new creation which has been influenced from culture which has come before you.

You can't substitute any profession over the top. Arts are intrinsically different, their value is much harder to calculate. This has long been discussed throughout history, it is only in very recent history that some of the arts have become a 'profession'.

> Top 3: Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Odyssey. The publishing companies who printed these books and spent the time typesetting, translating them etc aren't making money?

Right...not the artist.. That is a strange argument to make. In all those cases, the artist is long died, and someone (else) is trying to make a buck off of their work... Copyright is only meant to last the life time of the author + 50(?) years... So Shakespeare and Homer are really bad examples in a copyright debate.

> This argument only seems to come up in context to books/music/movies.

This argument comes up every time there is a major shift in how people act/produce. The same 'debate' occurred when the printing press destroyed monopolies on books... Who's response was: Copyright.

> it isn't some noble cause, it is because you don't rely on that industry to put food on the table, are cheap, and can get your entertainment online for free instead.

Nice ad hominem. Though try to keep that out of the discussion please.

This is more like talking past each-other than a real discussion, since you're not making any solid arguments addressing the points you're responding to. People downloading music can be an indication of opportunism as much as of market failure.

Think about how much smaller the music industry would be, and I'm just talking about the number of people making music themselves, if there were no sales of recordings. No more buying a CD on your way out of a local or touring band's show, no more iTunes Music Store or Amazon MP3 or CD store, no more labels; you're talking about taking away a majority of these artists' revenue. If musicians can't ever hope to get paid enough to put food on their table and a roof over their head, how many will put in the energy needed to bring their music to fruition? How many will put in the effort to make good recordings for you to enjoy? Making a good recording is difficult and expensive, and we benefit greatly from it. There is value there for us that we should have the courtesy of recognizing if we hope to enjoy a wide selection good music recordings in the future.

My initial point was not that they should give away their music. It was that people are taking it for free, regardless of copyright law.

That, plus the fact I think copyright is the wrong way to monetize this, and new ways need to be created.

But you are right, the discussion has deteriorated.

I will point out that copyright is extended to creatives by the general population as a mutually beneficial agreement to foster the development of creative works to be shared with said population. In the past five years, and to some extent before that, certain groups have started to abuse that relationship. I should come as no surprise that the attitudes towards the arrangement are starting to change. When the mutually beneficial part starts to erode, something is bound to give.

I'm not sure how the last handful of years of copyright law changes have done anything so dramatic to cause this. Copyright was extended an extra 20 years, that doesn't change the fact that the most popular content, ie the new stuff out right now, should still be paid for at the artists asking price.

It's not the same. When you consume music for free, you're consuming a product without paying the person that put the largest amount of work into it. Laws aside, where's the ethics in that?

In the music business there is certainly a fairness issue of middlemen taking a large cut, but Grooveshark is not solving that.

So if I hack into your network and steal your source code and release a product of my own based on that code you're cool with that, right?

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