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Comment by codeka | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if I should be impressed by this. From a technical standpoint, it seems quite clever and unique, but it also seems like a lot of work just to avoid using a <video> tag.

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Yeah it's weird. My web developer side is impressed by the technical detail that go behind it. But my other web developer side asks why the f*ck should achieving a simple video effect on a web page should be this hard in 2012?

There is a whole pattern of similar things like this in web that is killing me a little bit every day.

Want to center a div on the page? No worries just wrap it in these 5 divs and apply these 20 css properties and you are good to go. Oh btw, IE doesn't like that, you need this.

Honestly I think we developers should stop putting up with crap like this, and accepting the burden of broken technologies using hacks, etc...

If we become less tolerant of crap, there will be less crap. As long as we accept it by using workarounds, etc... there will be more shitty things to come.

CSS's flexible box model will eliminate that issue once it has wider support. There is a solution in the pipeline, it's just a matter of time.

Not the best link, but here's some more recent info: http://css-tricks.com/old-flexbox-and-new-flexbox/

What's difficult about centering a box? Was that just sarcasm? A couple of approaches:

Margin Auto w/ a fixed width

Absolute 50% w/ negative margins

Text-align center parent w/ inline-block display on children

If it was sarcasm, disregard my stupidity.

I think it was a hyperbole, but there really is a lot of dumb shit in web design.

That's still non-intuitive. Just do a search about centering (or X problem in CSS) and see the thousands of threads and questions and corner cases, hacks and exceptions.

The whole thing feels like you are stretching something beyond what it was intended to be used for.

Things like element positioning should be so so simple that if you search about it, you get nothing back because no one had a problem to ask for solutions.

Although I must say I'm not mocking CSS in particular, most web technologies feel this way because they were designed many years ago for a web that was supposed to have simple 'documents' like an article, text and paragraphs and today each component of it is expected to do a lot more.

It's not getting all that much better either because each new version and improvement is building on top of the previous decisions, etc...

  > most web technologies feel this way

Most technologies you don't know feel this way. And the reason—you don't know them.

  > It's not getting all that much better either because each
  > new version and improvement is building on top of the
  > previous decisions

In this case: no.

If that wasn't intuitive enough, feel free to email me and I'd be glad to teach/walk you through the many unfortunate ways to go about this: me@ryanglover.net.

Right. Now center it vertically. Also don't make any assumptions (like fixed height, or display: block) about container and the box to be centered.

http://cssdeck.com/labs/aqdw0l21/0

Container has fixed dimensions in my example, but it does not matter in this case.

removing them matters...

If container height is given by percentage you have to wrap it in another div with display: table. And if container is supposed to behave like inline-block you have to wrap it in yet another one. If you need to sprinkle around some margins and paddings (esp. with percentage height) you have to choose boilerplate divs to apply them to carefully.

Btw. your approach is exactly same that we had 10 years ago but with CSS table behavior faking rather than table tag.

Yay. Progress.

I think I am waiting for simple vertical alignment since CSS1.

It's like variables (yeah I know, LESS / SASS ...).

>Margin Auto w/ a fixed width Absolute 50% w/ negative margins Text-align center parent w/ inline-block display on children

Yes, totally intuitive and logical solutions all of them.

If you have w3c Stockholm syndrome, that is.

E.g "Just absolute 50% it with a negative margin" (oh, yes, and you would have to know the width beforehand).

>If it was sarcasm, disregard my stupidity.

It's not the stupidity, is the willingness to put up with BS convoluted inelegant workarounds for lack of basic, bread and butter, features.

If you value elegant APIs, KISS and DSLs, you should run screaming in the opposite direction in all those three, horrible, horrible, techniques.

W3C first came up with their (broken) model, and then they kludged solutions to use cases with it, instead of starting from the use cases first. That's why we have had the tables before and the need for the flexbox and grid layout now.

It's not the stupidity, is the willingness to put up with BS convoluted inelegant workarounds for lack of basic, bread and butter, features.

You're right, there is a willingness to put up with it. Mainly because I understand how these solutions work, how to debug them, and make everything nice and peachy. Do I wish things were better? Of course! Who wouldn't?

Well, we're in the same boat then.

Centering a box horizontally is simple. The original comment was referring to centering an element _vertically_, which is a much greater PITA.

Android's XML layouts feel a lot like a non-braindead web. There are a lot of similarities really, but simple things like vertically centering an element are as easy as they should be.

Text scaling can be a PITA though.

Same with XAML/WPF on Windows platforms which is very refreshing if you've been building for the web for years.

Yeah I've dabbled just a bit with these and they seem like a nice way to build UIs, also making data binding a lot cleaner than on the web or in the various mobile SDKs.

Honestly I think Microsoft has the best developer toolkit in the business right now but they haven't yet had the product design prowess to put that technology in the consumer's hands in any significant numbers.

May I present you the flexbox model!

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/

If you need IE8+ support, there is also display:table and family.

As noted in the post, iOS devices will only do video tags fullscreen.

I just tried on my friend's iPod and the animation doesn't play there anyway (it just stays on the "lock" image). Maybe the iPod browser is different (my Android doesn't play the animation either) but I'd be surprised if the animation worked on an iPhone but not on an iPod...

It definitely works on iPhone (I've tried on my 4S and on Simulator).

Apple's JS disables the animation for iOS 4.x and below, so maybe that's why it wasn't playing on your friend's iPod.

> Apple's JS disables the animation for iOS 4.x and below, so maybe that's why it wasn't playing on your friend's iPod.

I see Apple is really embracing the idea of "the one web" here, introducing web-fragmentation even among their own devices.

Apple has long stopped impressing me. Back in the days when they were the clear underdogs, they were for web-standards and a unified web, because they saw how that was good, and that was what allowed them to become what they are now.

Now it seems they don't really have so much ideological issues with how web-pages should be built anymore. Funny thing that.

There's nothing non-standards compliant about what they've done, as far as I can tell. Disabling the animation seems like an attempt at ensuring graceful degradation.

Graceful degradation shouldn't be based on user agent sniffing. That defeats the purpose.

I would argue that any reasonable technique that allows users of older browsers to access your site or use your app relatively normally is within the bounds of what we would describe as "graceful degradation." Being non-automatic doesn't make it any less valid.

that is only true for iPhone and iPod touch, you can have inline video on the iPad.

And in iAds on the phone...

Seems like a lot of work to workaround a drawback in their own browser.

Anybody knows, why can't we use GIF instead?

You probably could, but given that GIF files are limited to a 256-colour palette, it would probably look pretty horrible. Especially for such a large image.

Also you would end up having varying frame rates in different browsers.

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