Neat idea, very poor implementation. If you try to view the examples in Google Chrome, you'll get a notice that you have to download Safari (http://skitch.com/bradgessler/dgw7p/apple-html5)
This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.
Some of the demos only work in Safari. Even a nightly Chromium snapshot does not support everything that Safari does.
I ran Chromium with my user agent set to Safari. And here's where it gets interesting.
The demos that don't work in Chromium, notably the ones that require CSS 3D transforms, get removed from the listings on the pages that have them. So for example, the "Transitions" page, only the Dissolve, Toss, Slide In, Iris and Fade Through effects show up. Unsurprisingly, those are the least technically impressive. The gallery demo in Chromium runs at a fraction of Safari's frame rate. Very choppy.
The VR demo gives you an overlay explaining that it's only supported by the iPhone browser, Safari, or another browser with 3D CSS transforms.
So I guess their demos actually detect if your browser meets the spec or not, and remove the stuff that doesn't work. I'm guessing this was the original plan -- let everyone in to show off the HTML5 tech. But then someone looked at the nerfed versions without 3D and compositing and said "that's pretty weak, we don't want that to be people's impression" or something.
"The upstream work is not sufficient for what we will need. It is only the beginning of the work. We would need to offload compositing to the GPU."
Sounds like Apple decided to enable the existing WebKit implementation while Google is working on their own implementation. (which could very well end up back into WebKit proper at some point) This is exactly how standards in the context of friendly competition are supposed to work. You can't really expect everyone working off WebKit code to coordinate when certain features or standards support are turned on in beta or public releases.
What is the purpose of showing demos that work only on Safari? How can one call this a standard? Standards should work everywhere IMO. One of the many criterion I use to define a standard is that it is widely available. Right now, Flash is more a standard than HTML5 according to this criterion.
Jobs is doing what Gates was doing - locking everyone on his platform. I don't know the stats but the Safari browser share is very low (on Desktops).
You don't really get to "define a standard", the W3C does. Standards are about the way the web should be, not the way it is.
The difference is between adopting open standards that others haven't gotten around to yet
versus inventing your own undocumented functionality for the purpose of making compatibility impossible.
Apple is further down the track. MS was trying to derail the train.
Making you download Safari does seem a strange choice. But then, the whole point of the page is "look how well these things work in Safari", so why not?
The point probably being that these features are specified in the standard, but aren't implemented everywhere yet. This isn't lock in, because other browsers will presumably implement them soon(tm).
This seems to be a point a lot of people are making, but it isn't really true. Most of the features shown in these demos are not part of any web standard. HTML5 is actually not a standard, but even if it were this would still be only partially accurate.
In reality, all of the CSS transforms and effects (and plenty of other Safari features) were created by Apple without input from any of the other browser vendors or standards bodies. Some of those things have been picked up, some haven't. I actually think this is the right way to do things, and I don't want to give off the impression that I don't appreciate what the Safari team has spent the last few years doing, but I'm also not wild about letting Apple distort the picture for the sake of scoring PR points against flash (which is what this website is all about).
IE6 was the standard. It is not longer the standard because it was written in 2001. Bash IE6 all you like, normally I would join in but make sure its a valid point.
Excuse me? IE6 was a standard of what exactly? Sure it was the best browser back in 2001, it was the most popular browser for a while, so what?
The point of my comment was that standard is not something that works on the browser you have, it is something that parties agree upon.
How many of those bashing Apple here know that the editor of HTML5 spec (Ian Hickson) is from Google, not Apple? How many do know, that all that nifty stuff this demo shows is already submitted to W3C? How many do know, that a lot of it is already supported by Mozilla and Opera with (oh horror!) their own vendor prefixes? Alas, judging from comments a few do understand what vendor prefixes are.
I am a member of WHATWG mailing list so I can see how standards are born, and this level of misunderstanding about web standards in general and HTML5 in particular really saddens me.
Since when does a "standard" mean that it magically works across all browsers. Is HTML5 less of a "standard" because Microsoft is too lazy to implement it properly in their browser?
Which, given other browser-makers' commitment to supporting the emerging specs, just goes to show that 'standards' is a misnomer in this case. In informal usage that's OK; most of us hope that the standardisation of CSS3, HTML5 and related WHATWG initiatives will happen sooner rather than later. But misapplying the term in your marketing material (linked from the front page) is confusing and unhelpful.
Uh, what? The vast majority of the time, when people talk about web standards, they mean the W3C recommendations. Suddenly, when Apple uses it in marketing material, it means "recommendations that have been implemented by all browsers"?
Upvoted. You are correct. HTML5 is not yet even approved W3C candidate recommendation.
To be more accurate Apple should have said that it is committed in implementing HTML5 standard, not that it has done it, because at the moment HTML5 is not ready.
From Wikipedia: "Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products"
2022? Then those guys move too slow to be useful. Good on Jobs for trying to force it to move at a more reasonable pace. There is no reason to wait so long.
For a spec to become a REC today, it requires two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations, which is proven by each successfully passing literally thousands of test cases (20,000 tests for the whole spec would probably be a conservative estimate)
The candidate recommendation phase, which WHATWG expects to happen next year is a much more relevant date. That aside I do wonder if this level of effort isn't just wasted pedantry.
Ian is not saying people should wait until 2022. That quote is taken out of context.
He was saying that it is useful well before it is an official recommendation. He is a member of the WHAT-WG and Apple was one of the founding members so what he's saying is pretty much in lock-step with apple and the webkit team.
Many browsers still do not support full css2 support. Why should we expect full css3 support? Thats why the 2022 seems so far away. It states FULL support not partial like most all browsers currently do.
> This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.
Can you, or any of the dozens of upvoters, explain the logic behind that criticism? It literally seems to make no sense to me, so I must be missing something. The page talks about emerging web standards and talks about Safari and Apple's support for them. It mentions that not all browsers support all of the latest standards, and then it gives examples of some of the latest standards that Safari supports. So, huh?
You’ll need to download Safari to view this demo.
This demo was designed with the latest web standards supported by Safari. If you’d like to experience this demo, simply download Safari. It’s free for Mac and PC, and it only takes a few minutes.
As you see, it doesn't mention that MY BROWSER doesn't support the latest web standards. It simply says, that Safari supports web standards and that if you want to check the demo, download Safari. If you don't want to download Safari, you won't see the demo.
Except I don't need to download Safari to view all the demos - most of them work fine in Chrome if you run them from here:
http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
Not from the "public" page though. If I click on the typography demo I get the message that I MUST download Safari, even though we can see that that demo runs fine in Chrome.
How come it's misleading? It didn't say Chrome can't run the demos. It just said if you want to see my demos (or my products) you have to install my browser. If you don't want to download and install it, don't see the demos. Not really strange for me, I'm used now to the Apple attitude.
It says you need to download safari to see the demos. This is not true - I can view them fine from another page on apple's site using Chrome. That seems misleading to me?
Using Chrome in Windows I can't even click through to the examples - I get a blocking pop-up telling me to get Safari. Doesn't that, coupled with the line "soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards" imply that other browsers are lagging behind so badly they can't even try to run the examples? That seems misleading to me. The standards are not complete, but they are more widely supported than this page seems to suggest.
> The page talks about emerging web standards and talks about Safari and Apple's support for them.
It doesn't say 'emerging'. It says 'reliable'.
> It mentions that not all browsers support all of the latest standards, and then it gives examples of some of the latest standards that Safari supports.
Except that it doesn't. (a) because the specs are still in draft, and (b) because independent tests show Safari's support to be impressive but nowhere near complete.
Actually, transform is in the CSS3 working spec[0]. Until the standard reaches the "Candidate Recommendation" stage, the W3C encourages browser vendors to use prefixes (-webkit, -moz, etc).
DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha, on the other hand, wouldn't be part of CSS3, and uses its own specific syntax.
Is there any technical reason why using webkit's browser specific css attribute and firefox's browser specific css attribute is any better than using IE's browser specific css attribute?
`filter:` syntax isn't compatible with CSS tokenizer (IE<8 is unparseable without special tokenizer state set by the parser, IE8 uses non-CSS syntax in CSS string).
IE's transform filter uses only matrix, which scares the hell out of designers.
It's no standard because apple developers extended Webkit with some additional tags but noone else. That's what makes it so sad. Even more sad is that they misuse the words HTML, CSS3, JS and standard to convince you of the oh-so-open world of Apple. MS did that for years and every web developer pays for that today. But somehow now it's ok..
You don't see how having to install Safari for Apples vision of the internet is the same vision that MS had when building their crappy extensions to the standard?
Yes! Why doesn't Apple just let every browser run it and see how superior Safari is in term of HTML5 support? The answer is: Listen up, people! Download our Safari now! Time to ditch your IE, Opera, FF & Chrome!..
Or Chrome needs to catch up. It is "ok" on a Mac. For instance, if I see an image on a web page I can right click and copy that image and paste it into Mail....with Safari but not with Chrome.
So much for "standard". I wouldn't have expected understanding of "open" from this company, anyway. Yesterday Flash was bad, but today it's fine to write websites that only work in Safari, while using some Apple-specific HTML/CSS-tags.
What if it works only in Safari? Apple has done all the hard work, and now what all-other browser vendors have to do is, implement these open standards Apple has developed. Apple do not plan to allow Java,Qt,Flash and all these unnecessary platforms on their devices. Safari is the alternative Apple has. I dont see any reason why other vendors shouldn't embrace Apple's open standards
It's funny how many comments with the same opinion here get downvoted but no explanations why it's fine to add your own extensions to HTML/CSS (hello good old IE days). At least make your statements when downvoting so many people.
I think the problem is that your post doesn't read as if you're very well informed. You complain about apple-specific "tags" in a nebulous, hand-wavey manner, and all I can imagine is that you're actually talking about vendor-specific CSS properties.
And there's the problem: you're complaining about what you think is a violation of the CSS spec by making a reference to a mechanism and practice that was deliberately baked into it.
The authors of the CSS spec specifically accommodated vendor-specific extensions to give browser authors a place to work on supporting emerging abilities that are still in a state of flux. It's a special namespace where features are allowed to incubate. When these relevant standards leave draft status and become 'candidate recommendations', then a simple change will allow browser vendors to support whatever CSS property syntax is approved. When this happens, updating content on the web is an extremely easy change. This mechanism allows browser vendors and spec writers to work concurrently without creating a mess.
So, it's kind of funny that you're complaining about this when Apple is actually doing the right thing according to the letter and spirit of the spec:
Edit to head your next objection off at the pass: Yes, the spec also suggests that "authors should avoid vendor-specific extensions". This is a message to web developers, not browser developers. Apple does not want a web where every CSS file has "-webkit-" properties in it. They want these emerging standards to be ratified so that the vendor-specific properties can graduate to an official, approved syntax.
Extremely lame that they check the user agent. They probably all work fine in Chrome since it uses webkit also (I believe Chrome uses a newer version even).
This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.