6 ms·

Intellectual honesty and html5

181 points by superduper 16y ago

angelbob 16y ago
This post is lovely. I don't think it's realistic to get people to stop saying "HTML5" and start referring to all the little semi-standard pieces individually, so I'm really curious what this "intellectually honest" Mozilla messaging is going to look like.
ErrantX 16y ago
Refreshingly well written ("relaxed" is the word that came to mind). He highlights a paragraph which apparently is the important bit (and it is) but this, for me, is the really insightful statement (in the last section): HTML5 is in a dangerous place since everyone wants to own it, but everyone is in a different place in terms of support or even what it means. So true. This is the risk with HTML5 - it is becoming a buzzword for companies such as Apple to jump on and market with. Which isn't a bad thing; unless it is at the detriment of the standard.
- jamesbkel 16y ago
  I agree, a refreshing analysis. You're right in pointing out that line, but I think his highlighted paragraph (esp. the first few lines) provide some context for understanding/simplifying the conclusion. The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.
eordano 16y ago
At last! Someone that puts on his pants and screams what every Mozilla developer already knew. Marketing using the word "open" is the new fashion.
- flogic 16y ago
  "Open" is always in fashion so long as marketers don't have to tell the truth.
- jsz0 16y ago
  Isn't WebKit open source?
kierank 16y ago
History is clearly repeating itself with the proprietary "HTML5 extensions". EDIT: To the downvoters, I'm sorry that you don't like the truth.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  To be fair, all or almost all of the features Apple (and others) are showcasing do have open specifications at various stages of standardization. The bad thing about branding them collectively as some sort of "HTML5 standard" is when people start calling other browsers non-compliant with standards that aren't even stable targets yet. Or targeting one browser's draft implementation, without even checking to see which other browsers have comparable support. This is a major problem for us on the Mobile Firefox team. Since a huge portion of mobile web pages are now targeting WebKit browsers only, it's hard for competing browsers to enter this space. Mobile Safari is the new IE (in the sense that we need to reverse-engineer its non-standard features like meta[name="viewport"] in order to compete with it).
  - blasdel 16y ago
    Well the web needed a means of setting the viewport scale, and the one Apple came up with is as good as any. Are you really insistent that you come op with your own "-moz-viewport" crap just because there isn't a draft standard? The vendor prefix bullshit of the last few years is going to be around for at least another decade, with every CSS3 property being set three goddamn times because the vendors will have shipped support for the prefixed version for several major releases before they think about blessing it. I wish y'all would only do that stuff in beta releases to keep it out of the wild. Setting the viewport doesn't require anything like trampolining through VBScript, loading an ActiveX control, or calling a DirectX function via VML (all things I've had to do recently). MobileSafari is not the new IE. Have fun being another legacy browser on a slow release cycle that can't ship a decent mobile browser.
    - WalterGR 16y ago
      > MobileSafari is not the new IE. You said exactly why it is the new IE: > The vendor prefix bullshit of the last few years is going to be around for at least another decade, with every CSS3 property being set three goddamn times because the vendors will have shipped support for the prefixed version for several major releases before they think about blessing it. I wish y'all would only do that stuff in beta releases to keep it out of the wild.
ugh 16y ago
Apple wants to show that you can do kick ass stuff on iPads, iPhones and Macs without any of that Flash crap (sort of paraphrasing Apple here, not necessarily my opinion). That’s probably their intention, not showcasing interoperability or openness. Those two words do their little buzzword duty and that’s that. (I’m really not all that irate about that. It’s a cheap shot at Flash but many – probably all – of the things Apple uses in their demo actually will be a interoperable and open standard in the near future and all those evil browser prefixes will be dropped.)
- zweben 16y ago
  That would be a good theory if their page wasn't titled "HTML5 and web standards." There's not much room for interpretation in that. I suspect that they simply let their desire to make the demos really impressive distract them from the original point of the demos. They could, I imagine them thinking, make some cool demos that would work in Chrome and Firefox and Safari, or they could make some even cooler demos that showed off things only available in Safari, and have a nice way to promote Safari to boot. The problem is, once they did that, it went from a showcase of HTML5 standards to a showcase of proprietary Safari features that might be standards eventually. Oops. I'm rarely critical of Apple, but this is one of those times that makes me wonder if anyone there had their brains turned on.
  - ugh 16y ago
    HTML5 and nice-sounding-buzzword. That’s something you can do. I don’t think it’s nice of them to throw around buzzwords while being so completely irony resistant, it’s just that I don’t think it’s a reason to be greatly angered.
    - zweben 16y ago
      I'm not greatly angered and I doubt anyone else is. It just strikes me as stupid, that's all.
  - jsz0 16y ago
    My interpretation is Apple wants to influence what the final standard is going to look like. This is their vision for it which is largely based off the current W3C working draft. What's wrong with that? That's how the process is supposed to work. Apple has a few features not presently in the working draft that they want to see in the final standard. Here's the demo and you can get the WebKit source code to see how it works. The W3C, which Apple is a member of, may ratify it as part of the standard or they may not. I don't think there's any indication it will effect WebKit's ability to follow the final standard.
tlrobinson 16y ago
And history repeats itself. "HTML5" is the new "AJAX".
- adamesque 16y ago
  And it couldn't come soon enough. I see words like these as very useful inflection points; on one side of the curve, a developer that uses them without revealing a more nuanced understanding is a developer I should avoid. And on the other side of the curve, it's a way for non-technical people to refer to a complex set of technologies they otherwise probably couldn't talk about (or spend money on).
ROFISH 16y ago
If "HTML5" is a term used for different things for different people, what's the term used for "shiny CSS toys" like the Apple HTML5 page? CSS3? Because that's actually what I'm interested in. All the canvas and video support is fine and dandy, but the shiny stuff like built-in rounded corners, border images, gradients, transitions, and animations are killer features. I have a feeling that we're going to have to define a whole bunch of terminology to move ahead. People are confusing the HTML5 "markup additions" to the HTML5 "javascript upgrade" to Apple's HTML5 "hey look Ma, no Flash and lots of shiny!" (And to be fair to Apple, even Chrome doesn't fully support Apple's CSS3 shiny 3D toys, so that's why they had a Safari Only "HTML5" demo.)
ellyagg 16y ago
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.
- rpdillon 16y ago
  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.
  - lurch_mojoff 16y ago
    If you go to the developer page (here http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ ) you can attempt to run the demos in any browser you fancy. 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.
mhartl 16y ago
It's even worse than he says: try using Safari to visit the VR demo at http://www.apple.com/html5/showcase/vr/ http://www.apple.com/html5/showcase/vr/ and you might be greeted with this: This demo requires a browser that supports CSS 3D transforms. To view this demo, you’ll need Safari on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Safari on iPhone OS, or the latest WebKit Nightly Build. Here I am, some poor schmuck using Safari on regular Leopard, not Snow Leopard. Serves me right for being a few months out-of-date. (N.B. You'll never see a Snow Leopard on Safari—Snow Leopards live in Asia, not Africa.)

181 points by superduper 16y ago

This post is lovely. I don't think it's realistic to get people to stop saying "HTML5" and start referring to all the little semi-standard pieces individually, so I'm really curious what this "intellectually honest" Mozilla messaging is going to look like.

ErrantX 16y ago

Refreshingly well written ("relaxed" is the word that came to mind). He highlights a paragraph which apparently is the important bit (and it is) but this, for me, is the really insightful statement (in the last section): HTML5 is in a dangerous place since everyone wants to own it, but everyone is in a different place in terms of support or even what it means. So true. This is the risk with HTML5 - it is becoming a buzzword for companies such as Apple to jump on and market with. Which isn't a bad thing; unless it is at the detriment of the standard.

jamesbkel 16y ago
I agree, a refreshing analysis. You're right in pointing out that line, but I think his highlighted paragraph (esp. the first few lines) provide some context for understanding/simplifying the conclusion. The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.

eordano 16y ago

At last! Someone that puts on his pants and screams what every Mozilla developer already knew. Marketing using the word "open" is the new fashion.

flogic 16y ago
"Open" is always in fashion so long as marketers don't have to tell the truth.
jsz0 16y ago
Isn't WebKit open source?

kierank 16y ago

History is clearly repeating itself with the proprietary "HTML5 extensions". EDIT: To the downvoters, I'm sorry that you don't like the truth.

mbrubeck 16y ago
To be fair, all or almost all of the features Apple (and others) are showcasing do have open specifications at various stages of standardization. The bad thing about branding them collectively as some sort of "HTML5 standard" is when people start calling other browsers non-compliant with standards that aren't even stable targets yet. Or targeting one browser's draft implementation, without even checking to see which other browsers have comparable support. This is a major problem for us on the Mobile Firefox team. Since a huge portion of mobile web pages are now targeting WebKit browsers only, it's hard for competing browsers to enter this space. Mobile Safari is the new IE (in the sense that we need to reverse-engineer its non-standard features like meta[name="viewport"] in order to compete with it).
- blasdel 16y ago
  Well the web needed a means of setting the viewport scale, and the one Apple came up with is as good as any. Are you really insistent that you come op with your own "-moz-viewport" crap just because there isn't a draft standard? The vendor prefix bullshit of the last few years is going to be around for at least another decade, with every CSS3 property being set three goddamn times because the vendors will have shipped support for the prefixed version for several major releases before they think about blessing it. I wish y'all would only do that stuff in beta releases to keep it out of the wild. Setting the viewport doesn't require anything like trampolining through VBScript, loading an ActiveX control, or calling a DirectX function via VML (all things I've had to do recently). MobileSafari is not the new IE. Have fun being another legacy browser on a slow release cycle that can't ship a decent mobile browser.
  - WalterGR 16y ago
    > MobileSafari is not the new IE. You said exactly why it is the new IE: > The vendor prefix bullshit of the last few years is going to be around for at least another decade, with every CSS3 property being set three goddamn times because the vendors will have shipped support for the prefixed version for several major releases before they think about blessing it. I wish y'all would only do that stuff in beta releases to keep it out of the wild.

ugh 16y ago

Apple wants to show that you can do kick ass stuff on iPads, iPhones and Macs without any of that Flash crap (sort of paraphrasing Apple here, not necessarily my opinion). That’s probably their intention, not showcasing interoperability or openness. Those two words do their little buzzword duty and that’s that. (I’m really not all that irate about that. It’s a cheap shot at Flash but many – probably all – of the things Apple uses in their demo actually will be a interoperable and open standard in the near future and all those evil browser prefixes will be dropped.)

zweben 16y ago
That would be a good theory if their page wasn't titled "HTML5 and web standards." There's not much room for interpretation in that. I suspect that they simply let their desire to make the demos really impressive distract them from the original point of the demos. They could, I imagine them thinking, make some cool demos that would work in Chrome and Firefox and Safari, or they could make some even cooler demos that showed off things only available in Safari, and have a nice way to promote Safari to boot. The problem is, once they did that, it went from a showcase of HTML5 standards to a showcase of proprietary Safari features that might be standards eventually. Oops. I'm rarely critical of Apple, but this is one of those times that makes me wonder if anyone there had their brains turned on.
- ugh 16y ago
  HTML5 and nice-sounding-buzzword. That’s something you can do. I don’t think it’s nice of them to throw around buzzwords while being so completely irony resistant, it’s just that I don’t think it’s a reason to be greatly angered.
  - zweben 16y ago
    I'm not greatly angered and I doubt anyone else is. It just strikes me as stupid, that's all.
- jsz0 16y ago
  My interpretation is Apple wants to influence what the final standard is going to look like. This is their vision for it which is largely based off the current W3C working draft. What's wrong with that? That's how the process is supposed to work. Apple has a few features not presently in the working draft that they want to see in the final standard. Here's the demo and you can get the WebKit source code to see how it works. The W3C, which Apple is a member of, may ratify it as part of the standard or they may not. I don't think there's any indication it will effect WebKit's ability to follow the final standard.

tlrobinson 16y ago

And history repeats itself. "HTML5" is the new "AJAX".

adamesque 16y ago
And it couldn't come soon enough. I see words like these as very useful inflection points; on one side of the curve, a developer that uses them without revealing a more nuanced understanding is a developer I should avoid. And on the other side of the curve, it's a way for non-technical people to refer to a complex set of technologies they otherwise probably couldn't talk about (or spend money on).

ROFISH 16y ago

If "HTML5" is a term used for different things for different people, what's the term used for "shiny CSS toys" like the Apple HTML5 page? CSS3? Because that's actually what I'm interested in. All the canvas and video support is fine and dandy, but the shiny stuff like built-in rounded corners, border images, gradients, transitions, and animations are killer features. I have a feeling that we're going to have to define a whole bunch of terminology to move ahead. People are confusing the HTML5 "markup additions" to the HTML5 "javascript upgrade" to Apple's HTML5 "hey look Ma, no Flash and lots of shiny!" (And to be fair to Apple, even Chrome doesn't fully support Apple's CSS3 shiny 3D toys, so that's why they had a Safari Only "HTML5" demo.)

ellyagg 16y ago

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.

rpdillon 16y ago
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.
- lurch_mojoff 16y ago
  If you go to the developer page (here http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ ) you can attempt to run the demos in any browser you fancy. 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.

mhartl 16y ago

It's even worse than he says: try using Safari to visit the VR demo at http://www.apple.com/html5/showcase/vr/ http://www.apple.com/html5/showcase/vr/ and you might be greeted with this: This demo requires a browser that supports CSS 3D transforms. To view this demo, you’ll need Safari on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Safari on iPhone OS, or the latest WebKit Nightly Build. Here I am, some poor schmuck using Safari on regular Leopard, not Snow Leopard. Serves me right for being a few months out-of-date. (N.B. You'll never see a Snow Leopard on Safari—Snow Leopards live in Asia, not Africa.)