This is meant as inspiration, as an eye-opener, a PR move, and a gift to web developers & designers.
It does use emerging web standards. Just because some of them are not reliable everywhere does not discount that it’s all to be found in W3C and WHATWG draft specs. Note the HTML itself: They’re using <article>, <figure>, <header>. It’s really HTML5. (Remember, we consider things “standard” even before IE supports them.)
This is not meant as a compendium of current best practices. Progressive enhancement still applies in the real world. Apple knows that.
If you are criticizing this for being not cross-browser enough, you are completely missing the point.
The issue may be, however, that the standards committees for HTML5 haven't defined how different implementations of these standards are supposed to play together. And the question is: does Apple have the right to define how HTML5 should be handled cross-browser? (In this case, by very simply denying all non-Safari browsers -- at least via that link -- the developer links work -- kind of.) In all fairness, I think they do if other people haven't said anything else about it. But in even more fairness, perhaps other people (specifically the working groups) should make it more clear about whether or not you can target specific browsers.
If you want to do things progressively, there should be a feature matrix, and as more and more enhancements are fully implemented in all major browsers, one shouldn't be able to specify which browser you must use.
It's probably just my ignorance. But it's not clear to me where the lines are between best practices, web standards, and fairness (forcing a browser of course evokes nightmarish legal history a la Microsoft).
If anyone can point me in the right direction though (or maybe I'm asking the wrong questions), that'd be cool.
I suppose the risk is that because HTML5 has so many different features, it would be easy to basically not standardize. If Apple is the only company that fully supports interesting parts of the standard and they keep on iterating and nobody catches up -- is that really a standard? But are we right to deny them further development and innovation? I think there's a balance, but where is that balance? We've now got a lot of cooks in the kitchen:
Hope it works. But you know what they say about committees, second-system syndrome, etc... Though honestly it's not like I see any other solution....
Though an easy to browse website that showed near real-time progress of all the major browsers' implementations of the HTML5 feature set, so we can at least see the playing field. That might be a start.... I definitely think it's in everyone's interest to cooperate.
Web standards circles agree that "browser sniffing" as opposed to "feature detection" is kind of evil. (See http://modernizr.com for one way to do it right.) This, however, is a very special case, where the whole point is showing what ones specific browser can do.
Generally, the user's browser is irrelevant to the point of a website, and supporting as many browsers as possible is best.
In this case, the user’s browser matters most, as no other browser currently has 100% feature parity with Safari features used in these demos.
That's a good point. And I can understand that Apple, esp. if they are targeting creative / ad people, are probably aiming for a completely professional look (v. Flash, etc.). Until the other browsers catch up, I suppose they have every justification for doing what they're doing. One could argue, that they don't want browsers that aren't fully conforming which might give a bad impression of the viability of this post-Flash world.
On the other hand, browser sniffing, as you mention, is a slippery slope. Maybe all they might do is acknowledge that until other browsers have fully implemented 3D CSS, etc., they are only recommending Safari.
ETA: Never mind, I went back and read the page:
Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.
In the standard, it’s just "transform". "-webkit-" is called a "CSS vendor prefix" and the idea is this: If the standard changes before it’s finalized — it does happen — but Safari just implemented "transform" and not "-webkit-transform", then sites created in the interim could be stuck with broken CSS, retroactively. Mozilla did this forever ago with "-moz-border-radius" rounded corners. Even Microsoft started using the "-ms-" vendor prefix.
Using vendor prefixes does not equal to being non-standard, from the CSS3 Working Draft[1]:
> there are situations (experiments, implementations of W3C drafts that have not yet reached Candidate Recommendation, intra-nets, debugging, etc.) where it is convenient to add some nonstandard identifiers to a CSS style sheet.
Most extension Apple used in the demo page are part of CSS3 Working Draft, including CSS transform[2].
It does use emerging web standards. Just because some of them are not reliable everywhere does not discount that it’s all to be found in W3C and WHATWG draft specs. Note the HTML itself: They’re using <article>, <figure>, <header>. It’s really HTML5. (Remember, we consider things “standard” even before IE supports them.)
This is not meant as a compendium of current best practices. Progressive enhancement still applies in the real world. Apple knows that.
If you are criticizing this for being not cross-browser enough, you are completely missing the point.