Microsoft are officially doing "lots of stuff" re: the HTML5 Canvas. | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft are officially doing "lots of stuff" re: the HTML5 Canvas.

processingjs.org

13 pointsf1lt3r20 comments

What's so bad about companies not bullshitting? If Microsoft said "We think HTML5 isn't worth our time, and we won't lift a finger until we see it picking up," I'd like them a lot more than when they make empty claims. That way, when they actually do stuff (does the IE team do stuff anymore?) I can trust them and look forward to it happening.

Google getting behind HTML 5 is probably going to force Microsoft's hands quite a bit. I can't imagine Google rolling out a bunch of new RIA features and having them break in IE, it would look terrible for Microsoft.

It's difficult because Google needs to compromise themselves enough to work for the IE majority. If they break too much then people won't get Chrome. They'll stop using Google.

What and start using Bing and Hotmail? get real...

That's a stupid argument. Would people stop using Gmail if it refused to work for IE6/7/8? Yes. They would stop instantly.

Where the hell did Bing come in? Some people use Google Search and Hotmail. You're not locked into a company. Furthermore, this was never about search, this was about more complex applications. If Google Search told you to download Chrome or else you couldn't use it, you can fucking bet users would start using Yahoo. Laziness trumps everything else. That's why I use Mibbit rather than downloading an IRC client.

Hotmail leads Gmail by 13 million uniques. Gmail is the fourth-largest service. Just because it's the best doesn't mean it's the most popular.

Real enough for you?

No, IMHO they wouldn't. What do you think the browser share is for GMail? I'd say likely 40% or so on IE at the very most. If that. If they stopped supporting IE, some of those would stop using gmail, but a large number would upgrade to a standards compliant browser. They'd still be left with maybe 80% of their original users.

>> That's why I use Mibbit rather than downloading an IRC client.

You have good taste ;) FYI, On Mibbit, IE usage is at 26%, and falling.

In webapps, IE is a very small minority, and falling fast.

But Mibbit appeals to a very niche technical community. Gmail's market share is less than 20%, if I recall correctly.

A lot of people using IE right now are either forced to use it for corporate purposes - my mother has to use it on her laptop - or they're completely illiterate. If something messes up, they'll see it as Gmail breaking.

The solution is graceful degradation, but that won't force people to switch.

Or they could just keep legacy versions around for IE users and entice them to upgrade with promises of new features, better UIs, more eye-candy, etc. Best of both worlds for Google.

Yeah they do a lot of stuff. I think the reason people feel they don't is that their coming and goings are largely enveloped behind the green paper curtain. They do put things out there more than people give them credit for, but we are often not aware of them because of a natural schism between the consensus of a world-view and the forays of a dominant corporate machine. Regardless... the two organisms are really different faces of the same entity and should be treated as such if we are to experience the maximum reward from it's cumulative knowledge, which after-all is the primary purpose of the Internet in the first place.

I think we are reading too much from cryptic political messages.

Unless HTML5 and canvas gain a lot of momentum, and Google is doing a lot in this direction, Microsoft will come up with a broken half-compatible and quirky implementation geared to badmouth the whole HTML5 thing as they did with the ODF "support" in Office.

This is nothing like ODF support...

ODF is an incomplete standard. Spreadsheet formulas, for example, were not even mentioned when Microsoft started their spec and still aren't even final. It has been at least two years!

Microsoft created a new standard so that it could satisfy the openness demands of their customers (i.e. government organizations) while maintaining the existing level of functionality. Had they waited for the ODF standard, they'd still be waiting. I think the Office file format team did a stellar job without an ounce of malice.

That doesn't even begin to approach reality, and sounds more like a list of talking points you've picked up from somewhere than a genuine opinion.

I'm getting really sick of Microsoft's new "we can't even begin thinking about implement anything until after it's a fully approved standard" while churning out their own proprietary, unstandardized competitors to those same standards. It's so brazen it's insulting.

Agreed. Mozilla are also doing their part with FireFox, they have something called "35 Days" coming up to co-inside with the public release of 3.5, which is packed with juicy HTML5 goodness.

I think Microsoft are badly hurting from the their lack of web-focus (or at least web-productivity) over past years (around v6), but I don't think they are maimed. When you actually meet some of these guys at conferences etc: they seem to be very intelligent individuals, who have their finger on the pulse, yet remain very guarded.

Their guardedness is understandable from a corporate perspective, but it also carries personal weight when you hear a room full of people bad-mouthing IE with some of their developers standing at the back of the room. I have to say I am sympathetic to their position and believe in their ability, even though I am very much NOT an IE developer or enthusiast.

Apple is doing something is this direction. As far as I know, there is still neither Silverlight nor Flash available on iPhone. But you can implement some neat interactive applications with Canvas and JavaScript that also work on the newer IE-Browsers. So, in my opinion, the ice for Flash/Silverlight is already getting thinner.

Sorry, I forgot to provide an example.

It sure is not a killer application, the example is only meant to show that there already are usecases where you do not need such things as Flash.

Flash: http://www.engadin.stmoritz.ch/winter/berge/corvatsch/info/p...

Canvas/Javascript: http://alpinforum.ch/m/

Canvas and SVG would kill silverlight instantly and that's why M$ will never implement any of them.

As simple as that.

Silverlight's killer feature is adaptive video streaming. The current HTML 5 draft states:

" It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available. "

Netflix, MLB, NBC (Olympics), etc choose Silverlight to enable high quality video streaming while simultaneously supporting lower end connections without requiring manual quality selection. As far as I know, Flash can't do that and I don't expect the HTML 5 video element to be able to do it cross-browser and platform.

Canvas and SVG are nice, but they are hardly enough to kill either of the popular rich internet application browser plugins. Add in video and ignore a large pile of existing skill sets; you might have a case against Flash.

Silverlight isn't doing so great because, in true Microsoft fashion, there is too much complexity. XAML/WPF is a classic inheritance vs composition design disaster and the learning curve is simply outside of the scope of the average developer. Blend, however, is an amazing tool and may be able breath some life into the ecosystem. Silverlight will be the death of Silverlight, not Canvas or SVG.

I really don't see how XAML is that much more complex than SVG, but I'm not really an expert.

The basics of both are quite simple and very similar. Once you get into animation, events, etc, things start getting hairy fast.

XAML was developed for WPF, but in reality, it is completely WPF-agnostic. It is a serialization format for declaratively constructing .NET object trees. It also supports several domain specific languages for various shorthands, such as data binding expressions. This is not unlike the style DSL in SVG, but these DSLs instantly break toolability unless you manually handle each one.

However, at the developer level, data binding (aka templating) is where the real complexity explosion is.

You know how there are dozens and dozens of various HTML template engines out there? It's something that initially seems simple, but everyone has a different opinion of how it works. The XML-based templating solutions, such as XSLT, are often considered verbose and cumbersome. Well, all those templating solutions are only tackling a static, one-way transformation!

XAML's data binding is an DSL-ish XML-based template language which supports two-way transformations, animation, event handling, runtime modification, and lots, lots more. It also deeply confuses the structure, and style of the documents in a way that a few extra divs or spans for the sake of your CSS doesn't even come close to.

I Disagree. I just got back from the Microsoft offices at Boston, and my personal hunch is that Silverlight is being primed for slick one-web device integration. While that may be possible to achieve with numerous languages, the people who seem to be really leading the way are in fact Microsoft:which makes me wonder: was the idea of having "a computer in every home" more a vision of the computer on the Star Ship Enterprise than the idea that everyone would have their own terminal? Judging by Bill Gate's abode, I would think the latter.

I'm not ruling out the possibility of Flash and Silverlight dying to HTML5, I'm just saying that it is unlikely to happen in the near future (even in HTML5) a) because of the people behind them and modern projects they are rolling out and b) because it takes a long time to change from one standard to another unless there is some kind of unforeseen tear in the fabric of hyper-space.

When all is said and done, it always seems come to down to the preference of the developer, which will always remain a diversity.

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