7 ms·

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 genera

by 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.
  - wanderr 16y ago
    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.
    - robak 16y ago
      guys, you sound crazy. Honstly. Why not to stick to Flash/Flex - it at least meets a definition of standard. What type of the standard it is when it works differently on every browser and then doesn't work at all at some? This is crazy. Who has time for this?
    - pavs 16y ago
      Chrome Dev 6, all of the demo, except number 5, works.
      - wanderr 16y ago
        So they'll let you try to run them if you have a webkit based browser but that's it? Can anyone confirm that any non-webkit based browsers work?
        technomancy 16y ago
        Just tried three gecko-based browsers; none work.
houseabsolute 16y ago
For me (thinking as Apple) it's this simple: - Let's create some demos of our new HTML5 support! - Do we want to be responsible for users' bad experience if other browser vendors make mistakes or implement things differently than we did? - No. That's it. Nothing nefarious about it.
- papachito 16y ago
  > For me (thinking as Apple) it's this simple: 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.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I see now. It's all a scam to get me to buy Safari, right?
    - elblanco 16y ago
      It's a scam to make you believe they care about standards.
FooBarWidget 16y ago
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.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  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. See this great comment from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1403749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1403749
  - FooBarWidget 16y ago
    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.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      They're draft standards, just like the rest of HTML5. It's not a standard yet either.
- ellyagg 16y ago

by ellyagg 16y ago

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.
- wanderr 16y ago
  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.
  - robak 16y ago
    guys, you sound crazy. Honstly. Why not to stick to Flash/Flex - it at least meets a definition of standard. What type of the standard it is when it works differently on every browser and then doesn't work at all at some? This is crazy. Who has time for this?
  - pavs 16y ago
    Chrome Dev 6, all of the demo, except number 5, works.
    - wanderr 16y ago
      So they'll let you try to run them if you have a webkit based browser but that's it? Can anyone confirm that any non-webkit based browsers work?
      - technomancy 16y ago
        Just tried three gecko-based browsers; none work.

houseabsolute 16y ago

For me (thinking as Apple) it's this simple: - Let's create some demos of our new HTML5 support! - Do we want to be responsible for users' bad experience if other browser vendors make mistakes or implement things differently than we did? - No. That's it. Nothing nefarious about it.

papachito 16y ago
> For me (thinking as Apple) it's this simple: 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.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I see now. It's all a scam to get me to buy Safari, right?
  - elblanco 16y ago
    It's a scam to make you believe they care about standards.

FooBarWidget 16y ago

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.

steveklabnik 16y ago
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. See this great comment from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1403749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1403749
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  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.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    They're draft standards, just like the rest of HTML5. It's not a standard yet either.
ellyagg 16y ago