

Tim O'Reilly: Google Bets Big on HTML 5 - Anon84
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-bets-big-on-html-5.html

======
pierrefar
How convenient for a web company to present a graph with no units or measure
of "user experience" and, surprise, the web is almost as good as the desktop
now. How... made up and fake.

How one earth did they measure "user experience"? What is responsible for the
up and down fluctuations (note, on a logarithmic scale) in the relatively flat
line for "native" user experience?

Finally, of course Google's own Chrome is the best.

~~~
mseebach
Apparently Android 1.5 is twice as good as iPhone 2.2.

Can we get him to plot in emacs and vi and be done with it? :)

------
tpgauthier
I would recommend anyone interested in Canvas to check out this exhibition of
experiments. There are a lot of "I can't believe it's not Flash" projects
collected here:

<http://processingjs.org/exhibition>

------
hunterjrj
HTML 5 sounds great, but until MS gets their act together and adds support for
it... no dice.

~~~
hunterjrj
C'mon, I understand this site is "Hacker News", but with IE having an
installed base of 42+%, you can't down vote me for pointing out the truth...

(Source: <http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>)

~~~
TweedHeads
Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are working together on HTML5.

That's consensus.

Pull that way if you want, progress goes the other way...

...with or without IE

~~~
showerst
If Tesla, Lamborghini, and Ferrari start making all electric cars, but Ford
doesn't, that's consensus right?

Market share matters. Maybe for specialized hacker sites we can cater to only
the good browsers, and graceful degradation is a must anyway, but it's a hard
sell to build a successful mainstream site by eliminating 40% (or more) of
users right off the bat.

~~~
calambrac
That's... such a wonderful comparison. Because we've never seen an apparently
dominant American car company lose serious ground to competitors because it
refused to pay attention to what consumers actually wanted, have we?

~~~
showerst
And yet, how much have any of those companies changed the car industry?
(Although I'll grant that Tesla has a chance).

My point is that the standards aren't set by the number of companies that
support them, they're set by the market share. Talking about browser makers
like IE doesn't exist is wishful thinking at this point, just like talking
about car makers as if GM and Ford have already stopped producing cars is
wishful thinking.

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't innovate around them, just that you can't
call your work a 'standard' until at least a majority of the market is on
board. (I mean standard in the market sense here, not standard in the W3C
sense).

~~~
calambrac
Just because the product still runs on gasoline, has a steering wheel, and
puts four tires on the ground, that doesn't mean the industry around the
product hasn't changed fairly dramatically. It's not a revolutionary change,
sure, but honestly, neither is implementing web standards. You're still
rendering html, applying css, and executing javascript.

As for the point about what constitutes a 'standard', you're just saying
there's a difference between an official standard and a de facto standard. I
won't dispute that. I don't think that's the story here, though. The story is
that IE used to be the de facto standard through merit before growing lazy as
hell and losing its technical lead, and that people are increasingly willing
to think they can move forward without it. It's been steadily losing market
share since 2004, while the web has absolutely exploded in that same time
frame. Are you really saying that its a bad bet at this point to not
particularly care about IE's attempts to bully the market by not playing nice
with the standards the other browsers are agreeing to support?

------
tlrobinson
Wow, that was fast, I'm still sitting in the keynote.

------
lunchbox
Video of keynote here:
[http://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/googleio2009/key...](http://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/googleio2009/keynote-
videos)

------
paul9290
So iPhone's Safari browser now fully supports HTML 5; audio and video?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Last time I checked Google Chrome didn't support audio or video either, nor
had they made any announcement about codec support when they did.

Apple, Opera & Mozilla all support the HTML5 but Apple supports H.264 with
AAC, the others support Ogg Theora and Vorbis.

It would be a major coup if the owners of Youtube came out for non-proprietary
audio and video codecs.

------
TweedHeads
HTML5 is the next wave, be prepared...

