

Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos  - bep
http://theflashblog.com/?p=2069

======
koeselitz
Sorry, this is apropos of nothing, but...

<grammar fanboy>In this article Lee quotes the Light Table demo as saying that
it was accomplished with "with just a few lines of CSS and JavaScript," and
then remarks that "I was curious as to the contents of those 3 lines as they
must be the most powerful 3 lines of code ever written. In actual fact, the
JavaScript file that drives the demo is 700 lines long."

What in god's name makes people assume that "a few" means "three?" "A few"
just means exactly what it says: a relatively small number. Two is actually a
relatively small number in certain circumstances, so you could say "a few" to
mean "two." In _this_ circumstance, 700 lines of code could be said to be "a
few" lines, because I've seen full Javascript apps that use _7000_ lines.

I don't really care about the trivial Flash/HTML5 contentiousness, and I'd
rather stay out of it. But I keep encountering these weird misapprehensions
based on imaginary rules concerning the phrase "a few," and it seems silly to
me. </grammar fanboy>

~~~
endtime
I took a graduate philosophy seminar as a senior and we spent a full lecture
debating the semantics and pragmatics of fuzzy quantifiers like this. There
was a sizable portion of the class that felt that "few" is a relative term (as
in "few people believe in aliens"), but that "a few" is an absolute term (as
in "I cooked a few eggs").

You may be a "grammar fanboy", but I don't think your proposed semantics of "a
few" are necessarily correct.

~~~
koeselitz
Oh, I agree that my own perspectives on "a few" aren't necessarily correct.
And "grammar fanboy" was just self-deprecation, not an indication of
expertise; _everybody_ uses grammar, so _everybody_ is as much an 'expert' in
how it should and shouldn't be used as anybody else.

What I was commenting on was the apparent accretions of personal "rules"
surrounding the use of the phrase "a few" colloquially. Sure, when I say "I
cooked a few eggs," there's a context; people know I wouldn't cook 7000 eggs,
so they would never assume that's what I meant. But I have in fact been chided
by people pedantically when I've said something like "I cooked a few eggs,"
meaning two; in this case, people have often said to me that what I really
mean is that I cooked a _couple_ eggs, as "a few" is apparently distinct from
"a couple."

All I'm saying is: there aren't necessarily little rules governing when people
can and can't use the phrase "a few." I object whenever I'm told that I really
shouldn't use "a few" to mean "a relatively small amount;" why not? Maybe
Apple's mention of "a few lines of CSS and Javascript" in the article really
does imply _only and exactly three_ , but I can't see how. It's possible that
there are agreed-upon linguistic usages that mean that Apple is actually
lying, but it seems to me much more likely that "a few" is just a phrase
that's more fluid and less strict than Lee is taking it to be. Chiding people
for using "a few" to mean "relatively few" rather than "always and only three"
seems silly to me.

~~~
endtime
I think most people have the intuition that 2 is a couple, a few is strictly
greater than a couple, and several is weakly greater than a few.

In any case, in this context, I think it's safe to say that "a few lines of
Javascript" implies something on the order of 3-10, rather than 700; I do
think Apple was being misleading. Just because the upper bound on something
(like the size of a JS library) is high doesn't mean that the phrase "a few"
can mean 700...it certainly doesn't scale linearly. At least, that's my
intuition, but I'd be pretty surprised if I'm an outlier here.

------
tptacek
I grudgingly concede that there might be some genuine kind of inter-browser
standardization politics around Apple coding demos labelled "HTML5" using CSS,
markup, and backend quirks specific to their (mostly open source) browser.

But is there any honest argument at all that these demos, regardless of how
letter-of-the-law standards compliant they actually are, are not categorically
more open, standardized, and web-centric than _Flash_?

~~~
ugh
They are. And they don’t even need the demos to tell us that (they admittedly
could have handled the demos better, I just don’t think it’s a big deal).
Safari is a great browser, Webkit is a kick ass render engine, you can do cool
stuff with it on the iPhone and iPad and all that cool stuff will (nearly
always) also work on any other (say, Android) modern mobile OS. Or nearly
every modern browser.

Moreover, if you don’t like the Safari UI you can check out one of several
Webkit browsers (most notably Chrome).

If you could do everything with emerging web standards that you can now do
with Flash this wouldn’t even be a contest. The emerging standards would win
hands down. You admittedly can’t (yet?) but it really does look as though the
scenarios where you need to use Flash are getting scarcer by the day.

Apple might be the bad guys with respect to the App Store, they are the good
guys as far as browser development is concerned.

~~~
Yaggo
I can fully understand why Apple promotes Safari. The demos are a showcase of
bleeding edge CSS, namely 3D transitions, currently implemented only by
Safari. No doubt other browsers will implement them too. See
<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-3d-transforms/>

Also, being hardware accelerated on OS X, Safari renders 2D/3D transitions at
superior framerate compared to Chrome (don't even mention Firefox). The
difference is huge. Apple's message is "Hey look, we made a great (open
source) rendering engine and want show you what can be done in HTML/CSS when
things are properly implemented. Check this out as a reference implementation
and feel free to implement it in your browser."

[Yes, the 2D/3D HW accelerated rendering uses Apple's proprietary frameworks
and is not open sourced, AFAIK.]

------
nexneo
Interesting to note that Mobile safari score 134 better then desktop version
which scores 122 for latest version of safari.

~~~
ROFISH
And, if the rumors are true (the rumors are never true), we'll get Safari 5 on
Monday. I'd like to see the browser score then.

~~~
tvon
Probably the same as the current WebKit nightly build (144).

------
Corrado
I just see this as another instance of Apple falling behind the curve. It used
to be that they were so far ahead of everyone else (in design, products, etc.)
that they didn't worry about everyone else. Now they are suing people for
copying their things, postering about how good they are, etc.

This new state of affairs saddens me somewhat as I have always liked and
respected Apple and they are now giving me cause to doubt them.

