It's an Apple page promoting Apple's adoption of emerging standards. I've never before seen criticism of a browser vendor adopting standards too fast. In general, web developers normally wish browser vendors had magical resources to implement proposals the next day and be able to iterate them just as fast as the proposals iterate.
Apple is at the forefront of standards adoptions, Safari's got some stuff that other browsers don't, and they want to show it off! What on earth is wrong with this? Firefox has better standards support? So what? Are we claiming Apple has a moral imperative to create demos of Firefox-only standards support?! Or, is it the even crazier claim that only the "best" product is allowed to promote itself? If you're selling Porsches and you say they're fast, is this offensive because Ferraris are faster? Good God.
I've also never before seen anyone so self-righteous about the use of the term html5; there's nothing about Apple's page which deserves special enmity for its "misuse" of this ambiguous term. In fact, I'm pretty sure in the future we'll see plenty of articles talking about html5, just as we have in the past, e.g., scribd converting from flash.
If you can't see how a company might find value in illustrating how quickly it implements emerging standards, I suggest you aren't thinking about it very hard. This page isn't about why web standards are important for cross-platform compatibility. Criticizing it for not demonstrating something which is not is purpose is awfully silly.
The outrage stirred up by the last couple of posts on this subject strikes me as follow-on to other perceived "evils" by Apple, and seems to be heavily biased rather than treating this issue on its own ethically distinct terms. But then, that's what people do.
The author isn't criticizing Apple for adopting standards too fast. I don't know why you got that impression. Instead, the author is arguing the following.
The term "HTML5" is supposed to be a standard, but the term has become a dumping ground for various parties. They introduce non-standard (or, at least, not-yet-standard) extensions in their browsers and call it HTML5. It's like Microsoft calling in-browser DirectX transformations HTML5.
I don't think a technology may actually be called HTML5 until it's standardized by WHATWG or by W3C, otherwise the term will become meaningless, and it looks like both Apple and Google are quickly on their way towards making that a reality. Once the term has come to mean "arbitrary cool browser-specific extensions" we are only one small step away from the age-old "embrace and extend" practice.
Coincidentally, Safari's recent Webkit 3D CSS transformations support (used everywhere in their demos) is very similar to DirectX transformations. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but as far as I know Webkit 3D transformations aren't (yet?) standardized by WHATWG or W3C.
No, his negativity wasn't nearly that focused. See the argument around his introduction of "fuck you". Aside from which, I'm partly making a meta comment on the discussion over this page. The last couple of posts concerning it have been catch-alls for poorly-argued, poorly-reasoned disdain. The html5 issue alone does not even remotely justify the negative response this page has gotten. That's a rationalization. Else, why have the dozens of articles posted here previously discussing htm5, with the same loose definition, not garnered the same emotional response?
The thesis I argued against is simply the best triangulation of the multiple, weakly expressed arguments made to justify the negative reactions.
And the claim that these "extensions" are the same as MS's from years past is, to put it mildly, nonsense. This has been pointed out elsewhere, so I won't rehash it. The aggressive refusal by some folks to not recognize this looks like bias to me.
Yes, but these 'browser extensions' aren't extensions in the same sense that IE's were. -mox, -ms, and -webkit are vendor prefixes, and they're part of the process for a vendor to get something put into the standard.
That is correct. But until they're actually put into the standard they shouldn't be labeled HTML5, unless you want the term HTML5 to become meaningless.
If their page is entitled "web standards", it's probably a bad idea to restrict the page only to users of Safari. Especially when it shares a rendering engine with Chrome and a number of other browsers that could probably run the demos.
For the record, when Google created Chrome Experiments (which used HTML5-ish technologies), they let any browser attempt to run the experiments, but the performance (in some cases) suffered. Apple is doing exactly the opposite.
On the consumer accessible page Apple are requiring Safari because they can guarantee that the demos will work and they can guarantee they will have reasonable performance. And that's what's important. That's an advocacy page, a PR thing, not "look at this cool code we wrote". Presentation is everything.
In other words, different goals - different implementations.
the really important part of html5 at the end of the day is for CONSUMER, not developers.
Here Apple doing exactly what dumb people did when they started the browsers war 10 years ago "this site is best viewed with X",
which later degenerated to "if you don't have browser X, go f*ck off" (you know wars ... people pick a side).
A browser is not here to guarantee an experience, it's here to guarantee you to browse content, and wether this browser support whatever version of HTML, this browser should not be blocked in any arbitrary way because the HTML should gracefully degrade, yeah even with Lynx on a command line.
Odd, when I go there in Firefox I can get to the pages but if I click View Demo on any of them (well, I tried the first 3) it still yells at me and tells me that I need Safari.
> On the consumer accessible page Apple are requiring Safari because they can guarantee that the demos will work and they can guarantee they will have reasonable performance.
I'm sorry, how is that supporting standard again? I'm not illuminated yet.
I tried the demos in Firefox and Chrome. Not all of the demos worked in either of them, so much for "could probably". It's not about Safari trying to make itself look better, it's about Apple not letting html5 look bad. If someone not-so-knowledgeable surfed to the demos with browser X and not everything worked then they may proclaim that html5 is crappy and doesn't work. Apple is trying to show-off html5 and that would be the opposite of their goal.
They restrict it to Safari because the dire truth is that so far, Safari is that one browser that does the STANDARDIZED HTML5 portions best. Chrome hits the second place not far behind, not surprisingly since it also uses the WebKit engine. Firefox however, by many peoples' experience - and, again, using HTML5 demos that do not use vendor-specific CSS magic, APIs and whatnot - simply fails at running most of these demos.
add.: to the downvoters... really, just load the page up in Chrome, check the demos, then load it up in Opera (with User Agent spoofing) and check the demos there, THEN try loading it up in Firefox, and you'll see for yourself whether it's a case of these HTML5 demos being "proprietary", "Safari only" or "broken", or if it's a case of Firefox just not cutting it yet. (Spoiler: it's a case of Firefox just not cutting it yet; almost all of the demos work identically in Chrome and Opera.)
Did you read the article? Those demos are not even part of html 5 yet (the ones that don't work on chrome and firefox at least). So calling them HTML 5 was not honest and a shameless promotion of Safari. Also, most of the demo do work great on both Chrome and Firefox, except the demos that are not HTML 5.
Apple is at the forefront of standards adoptions, Safari's got some stuff that other browsers don't, and they want to show it off! What on earth is wrong with this? Firefox has better standards support? So what? Are we claiming Apple has a moral imperative to create demos of Firefox-only standards support?! Or, is it the even crazier claim that only the "best" product is allowed to promote itself? If you're selling Porsches and you say they're fast, is this offensive because Ferraris are faster? Good God.
I've also never before seen anyone so self-righteous about the use of the term html5; there's nothing about Apple's page which deserves special enmity for its "misuse" of this ambiguous term. In fact, I'm pretty sure in the future we'll see plenty of articles talking about html5, just as we have in the past, e.g., scribd converting from flash.
If you can't see how a company might find value in illustrating how quickly it implements emerging standards, I suggest you aren't thinking about it very hard. This page isn't about why web standards are important for cross-platform compatibility. Criticizing it for not demonstrating something which is not is purpose is awfully silly.
The outrage stirred up by the last couple of posts on this subject strikes me as follow-on to other perceived "evils" by Apple, and seems to be heavily biased rather than treating this issue on its own ethically distinct terms. But then, that's what people do.