Tim O'Reilly: Google Bets Big on HTML 5
radar.oreilly.com
radar.oreilly.com
How one earth did they measure "user experience"? What is responsible for the up and down fluctuations (note, on a logarithmic scale) in the relatively flat line for "native" user experience?
Finally, of course Google's own Chrome is the best.
Can we get him to plot in emacs and vi and be done with it? :)
good luck.
If it truly IS a killer app, it will kill IE in short order.
We can dream, anyway.
(Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)
I agree with you, though, that it's weird to discriminate against such large audiences.
jd/adobe
That's consensus.
Pull that way if you want, progress goes the other way...
...with or without IE
Market share matters. Maybe for specialized hacker sites we can cater to only the good browsers, and graceful degradation is a must anyway, but it's a hard sell to build a successful mainstream site by eliminating 40% (or more) of users right off the bat.
My point is that the standards aren't set by the number of companies that support them, they're set by the market share. Talking about browser makers like IE doesn't exist is wishful thinking at this point, just like talking about car makers as if GM and Ford have already stopped producing cars is wishful thinking.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't innovate around them, just that you can't call your work a 'standard' until at least a majority of the market is on board. (I mean standard in the market sense here, not standard in the W3C sense).
As for the point about what constitutes a 'standard', you're just saying there's a difference between an official standard and a de facto standard. I won't dispute that. I don't think that's the story here, though. The story is that IE used to be the de facto standard through merit before growing lazy as hell and losing its technical lead, and that people are increasingly willing to think they can move forward without it. It's been steadily losing market share since 2004, while the web has absolutely exploded in that same time frame. Are you really saying that its a bad bet at this point to not particularly care about IE's attempts to bully the market by not playing nice with the standards the other browsers are agreeing to support?
If HTML5 is actually important to improving the end-user experience, if browsers that implement it have a real, demonstrable advantage over those that don't, then it doesn't matter if the consumer cares about HTML5 or not. They'll still want the results that technology enables.
When consumers say they care about the internals of their cars, what they actually care about are things like power, fuel efficiency, torque, whatever. They have nothing more than a superficial understanding of how the actual mechanics of the vehicle translate into these qualities. Talking about V8 engines, etc, is, for the typical consumer, nothing more than marketing.
HTML5 could certainly be a marketing device (5? That's one more than 4, it must be better!), especially if you showed end users cool things that web sites can do with HTML5 that they can't do with 4.
edit: ultimately we'll probably need some numbers to back our claims. I've got way too many bugs to fix to do any significant digging. But I'm open to counterexamples if you can find some numbers.
Apple, Opera & Mozilla all support the HTML5 but Apple supports H.264 with AAC, the others support Ogg Theora and Vorbis.
It would be a major coup if the owners of Youtube came out for non-proprietary audio and video codecs.