
SVG Girl IE9 HTML5 Promo - pwim
http://jsdo.it/event/svggirl
======
mcritz
We live in the era of CSS3, embeddable web fonts, & the text-shadow property,
yet this is what represents IE 9’s support for web typography:
<http://jsdo.it/event/svggirl/img/movie/img_loading_01_en.png>

If you’re going to resort to raster graphics at least do a better job hanging
that apostrophe in the word “it’s”.

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dendory
Don't you get it, now web pages don't require IE because it's broken and
doesn't support web standards, they require IE because it's so web standard
compliant that it's not compatible with any other browser!!

It's brilliant marketing!

~~~
lloeki
_"it's not compatible with any other browser"_

Works just fine with Chrome (beta channel) here on my Macbook Pro 5,5. Quite
fluid too, except for the "floating mountain part". Certainly more than 10fps
average.

~~~
LarryA
Same here with Chrome on Ubuntu Linux. Played fine.

~~~
dkersten
Chrome 10.0.648.205 on win7 here. Played flawlessly and smoothly.

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hebejebelus
That's definitely technically impressive. The thing is, though, I will never
understand why people show this kind of thing off. Nobody is going to make a
video like this in SVG except when they're showing off the capability of the
browser - it's simply not worth the money or the time.

I mean, sure, it's a tech demo, and a damn impressive one at that. But what's
it showing off? Those of us who know why it's technically impressive know that
it's never going to be worth it to do anything of this scale. Those of us who
don't don't see any difference between this and, say, a flash video.

Regardless of whatever it is that I'm missing, this is fantastic. I can't even
imagine just how difficult this would have been to make.

~~~
lloeki
It's not like there have been thousands of Flash movies and games made this
way. No no no.

It's showing off that SVG movie playback is there, and that we killed the
chicken and egg problem of another area of Flash: now we only need authoring
tools whereas before who would build SVG authoring tools when there was no
player?

Which brings us to how difficult it could have been to be made, as it really
comes down to what authoring tools they did use. Interestingly enough, after
the animation they offer a "simple mode" to trivially alter colors of the
animation.

I see it as a strong signal of: \- cross-browser compatibility went a step
further. \- one more thing we don't need a proprietary crashing blob anymore
as there is an open alternative. I was also pleasantly surprised at how well
it played on my Mac and Chrome. It was a bit slow at start on Firefox 4, and
was (surprisingly to me) even faster than Chrome on Safari.

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felixc
I find this rather bizarre, not least for the incredibly short cartoon skirt.
Who is it aimed at? Do the creators think that they will win over some
mythical basement-dwelling anime-loving "nerds" (male, of course) with this
campaign?

Is this what the marketing department thinks tech-savvy people are into?

EDIT: I mistakenly thought this was made by Microsoft; of course a more
careful reading on my part would have made it obvious that it is not.

~~~
patio11
Occam's Razor: it is geeky because the company behind it loves geeky things
and, indeed, is pretty much based on them.

<http://www.kayac.com/>

(Broadly, on the intersection of tech and geeky, for any value of "geeky" be
it anime subcultures or D&D, it is an _inevitable_ consequence of "scratch
your own itch" that tech overallocates resources to the fields of interest
techy people are likely to have versus those they are not likely to have,
which will tend to reproduce similarly lopsided distribution in the future.
This is profitably exploitable. Exploit it.)

~~~
felixc
I see your point; and I think most of my confusion stemmed from the fact that
I thought this was made by Microsoft. I simply didn't read carefully enough,
and was under the impression it was part of a Microsoft official marketing
campaign (like the Google Chrome comic books or something).

I love the business hustle view at the end of your comment, though!

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rjrodger
works fine in chrome... the entire thing is wrong on so, so many levels...

~~~
crikli
Yeah...I got to the baby voice and the phone and shut it off. It's a little
pedo-creepy.

~~~
lloeki
Not so much a baby voice as a robot voice. Robotic voices often have high
pitch distortion kind of tone in Japanese culture.

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knowtheory
I love that the progress loader behaves just like windows 98 application
installers do. Linear count up until object 56/107 loaded... 30 second
pause... sudden jump to 80 objects loaded, and the loading UI flips out trying
to catch up.

Microsoft is nothing if not consistent(ly bad).

~~~
lloeki
It's an object counter progress loader, not a progress bar. It has no reason
to be linear.

~~~
knowtheory
That's fine, but the way the UI behaves appears to be tied to the load %
completion. So the fact that it freaks out is a bit of a problem.

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dansingerman
Probably showing my age here, but to me it is very reminiscent of the IE4
DHTML tech demos (that's right, that's a four).

They were technically impressive in what they were able to achieve, but it was
technology no one was ever going to (and never did to my knowledge) use.

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ck2
Volume warning for those at work!

Minus the IE9 politics, I kinda liked that.

Felt a little "Witch Hunter Robin" meets "GITS SAC".

~~~
mrfu
More like a less gloomy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain>

~~~
knowtheory
without the musical aesthetic or the barest sliver of sanity that SEL had.

and 100% more creepy near-upskirt camera angles.

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lloeki
For those wondering, the voice at the beggining is counting from one to nine
in Japanese: "ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyu". Probably
related to the IE version progression.

Then says "I. E. nine ..." and I don't get the remainder.

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franze
i love the IE electrical ghost brainslug thingie, that explains so much.

~~~
zephjc
"IE 9: It will go all Exorcist on your brain, then make you hallucinate."

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joshuafcole
Curious. Am I the only one who can't seem to make it work even in IE9 (Tried
Ubuntu/Chromium Beta, Ubuntu/FF3.5~, Windows7/Chrome Canary, Windows7/IE9 (and
Compatibility Mode, just for kicks), and Windows7/FF4). Perhaps it's just
overwhelmingly more underwhelming than the fanfare? For reference, I get to
the part after the video has ended and the background slides away from behind
the frame. After that point, the music plays for a little while and everything
else is quite frozen and non-interactive.

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ehutch79
yeahi can't imagine why it's ie9 only. also, 10 frames per second? i can't
feel that's impressive. it still looks choppy. it's not till about 15 that
most people stop noticing choppyness, and really talk to me when you're doing
30 fps.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
10fps? wow it ran super smooth on FF4... awwww...

~~~
city41
it is programatically locked to 10fps I do believe. They even say specifically
that is what it runs at.

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kyledrake
Yeah, IE has a tendency to make people lose their mind.

