

Intellectual honesty and html5 - superduper
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/06/intellectual-honesty-and-html5/

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ellyagg
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
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
If you go to the developer page (here
<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
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.

~~~
pavs
Chrome Dev 6, all of the demo, except number 5, works.

~~~
wanderr
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
Just tried three gecko-based browsers; none work.

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ErrantX
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
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._

------
ugh
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
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
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
I'm not greatly angered and I doubt anyone else is. It just strikes me as
stupid, that's all.

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mhartl
It's even worse than he says: try using Safari to visit the VR demo at
<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.)

------
angelbob
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.

------
eordano
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
"Open" is always in fashion so long as marketers don't have to tell the truth.

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

~~~
adamesque
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
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.)

------
kierank
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
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
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.

~~~
mbrubeck
_> Are you really insistent that you come op with your own "-moz-viewport"
crap just because there isn't a draft standard?_

No, we're not insistent. We implemented WebKit's "viewport" meta tag. We can
be pragmatic too.

I just wanted to point out one of the many of Safari features that Apple is
promoting without writing any specs or standards, and the effect this has on
the browser market. Others include touch events, link[rel="apple-X"], -webkit-
text-size-adjust...

I agree the proliferation of vendor prefixes in the wild has bad effects, and
we are feeling the pain of it too.

\----

 _> Have fun being another legacy browser on a slow release cycle that can't
ship a decent mobile browser._

Thanks for the kind words. :) We know we're way behind the game on mobile, and
the only thing we can do to fix it is ship great software. I think when you
get a chance to see what you can do with add-ons for mobile Firefox, you'll be
tempted to switch.

We're on a rough six-month release schedule: Fennec 1.0 shipped in January,
Fennec 1.1 will ship this month, and we are targeting this October or November
for Fennec 2.0. Look for our first 2.0 alpha release for Maemo and Android in
a month or two.

[P.S. I see you're in Seattle too! Want to get together for coffee sometime?
Email me if you do.]

