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Apple's HTML5 and Standards Gallery Not Standard
snitch writes "Apple has created an HTML5 Showcase that presents its vision for the next generation of the WWW. The fact that this page is only accessible using the Safari browser, while Apple advocates about web standards, has caused many to criticize the company's lack of broader platform support. The showcase demonstrates several HTML5 capabilities and features that have to do with video, typography, transitions, audio, etc. Further, on the front page the company states that 'Standards aren't add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.' The latter statement falls short by the fact that the featured examples only work with the Safari browser, and in the case of the CSS 3D transforms demonstration, require Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Safari PC or plain Leopard won't do)."
Worked for me in Chrome.
Disagree != mod troll.
Apple is Microsoft 2.0
It works in Safari because Apple have been readying Safari to work with HTML5 for some time. What have other browser vendors being doing to get their browsers ready? Nothing? Or more slowly? Well, who's to blame if it can't be viewed in other browsers? Not Apple, is it?
Yeah, HTML5 is the future and as soon as we get rid of flash the better, but if you are going to try and show how its done, then do it right or don't do it at all, Apple.
Have a look at this: http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html#slide1
This is a very nice demo that doesn't tell you to get XYZ browser. Sure, some parts might not work at all if you are not running on the latest chrome or webkit browser, but most demos work and I find it to be a nicer way of doing things (IMHO).
(This was part of a presentation done by some googlers about HTML5 a few months ago)
HTML5 is still a work in progress. They could have made a demo that only uses those features which are already widely supported, but it wouldn't have been as impressive. Or they could have made a demo that uses the latest bleeding-edge proposals for HTML5, and let it fail on most people's browsers - perhaps even worse.
Given that it's meant to be a showcase of things to come, it makes sense to require you to use the one browser that currently works with it. Even Mozilla sometimes releases demos that require the latest Firefox beta to test. Using browser sniffing to enforce it is certainly bad form, but they probably thought that otherwise people would just click through, see a broken demo, and not even realize they aren't seeing what they're meant to see. Hopefully they'll relax the restriction once (if) more browsers implement support for these proposed new features.
Apple tends to take standards that are in their infancy, and make them mainstream.
I don't see anything wrong with this, other than it making other browsers like FF3 look like they haven't been innovating.
Some of this (about a third) worked for me in Firefox with the user agent switcher add on. The default user agent switcher doesn't include safari but you can import them from the following URL. http://techpatterns.com/forums/about304.html
I've never thought much of apple, but my one purchase (an ipod touch), was a mistake. I hate the DRM, the control over my asset, etc. I'll be selling it soon, going to a droid.
If you'd like to see how well it works in firefox, you can override the about:config setting for the useragent. I changed the general.useragent.override string to
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.22.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
And I was able to view the tests without the message about requiring Safari. That message appears to get stuck in a cookie so you you might need to reload the base apple.com/html5 page before trying again.
User agent switcher turns some things on in Firefox.
http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/
with following settings:
Safari
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; ja-jp)
Mozilla
Safari
4.0.5 Safari/531.22.7
MacIntel
[empty]
[empty]
A lot is broken though.
1) Select the Typography demo
2) Select "Pincoya Black fonts"
3) Enter a couple of lines of lower case "o" (they are underlined)
4) Rotate slowly so you see the step by step motion
What you'll see: spacing between each "o" varies at each rotation step, and you can see "steps" in the underlining. That wouldn't happen with flash.
Basically while the fonts are anti-aliased, the position of each letter is computed as an integer. In flash, every coordinate is computed in floating point.
Welcome back to pixel world.
Once again Slashdot jumps to conclusions. The showcase is to promote Safari not web standards. The way the write up reads is that these are the web standards, and these are what they can do. Its blatant in the second paragraph, "The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript." that they are promoting Safari and not web standards. This our toy and this is why it works better then yours is the message. Its Apple. If Apple were not so full of themselves all the time I'd think they were not following their mission statement. Showing me web standards that no one has implemented yet and only works on your browser is akin to giving me a 100 GHz processor writing a really graphics heavy OS (that only you sell), and has no application base, when the rest of the world has Windows 3.1.
Its odd that the examples at http://www.apple.com/html5/ browser sniff..
Whereas the same examples at http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ work fine in other browsers.
I really recommend downloading Safari 4 or even WebKit nightly
Does Safari 4 work in Wine?
Apple has every reason to want this working on the iPad. The source code for the CSS, Javascript, and HTML looks standard to me, but I am not a professional web developer or software professional. I have seen IE source code that only worked on Windows, however, and the extra MS-Specific stuff was obvious. This code does not look like this. The comparison between Apple and Microsoft is suggestive but not entirely reasonable. Apple is not the only hardware manufacturer to differentiate its products with proprietary technology. And, unlike Microsoft, Apple does not require every PC-compatible machine to use its OS (if PC compatibility is desired).
There are good reasons to criticize Apple for its business practices (capricious APP rejection policies, for example), but it's a bit premature to cry wolf about this HTML5 demo. Think of Adobe's zero day warning yesterday before you slam Apple for at the least attempting to get to open standards. This is a technical forum. What, exactly, is non-standard in the demo code?
Would it help if they added the word "beta" to the title, like all those other sites on the web that don't want people complaining that not everything works yet the way it is supposed to?
All you dumbasses just don't get it. These demos are showing what the HTML 5 standard can do. The fact that other browsers aren't there yet has nothing to do with Apple !
Not the popular opinion, but think about it. M$ started out the same way.
- Get people hooked on the new-exciting-and-different (windows 3.1)
- you were a Luddite if you weren't adopting it
- People that new almost *nothing* about computers could "use" a computer
After the customer base was established, Microsoft Works came in and locked everyone into a proprietary format (they didn't know better). This was followed by Excel, Word and Access, and then Exchange.
Apple is taking the same road and once again people who don't know they don't know, don't know.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
It's a demo of Safari's HTML 5 capability. Of Course you need safari to use it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Default.html
No user agent checking, and they work (or don't work in the case of older IE versions) in different browsers...
The way I see it, it's just Apple using their current 'standards' press coverage to increase browser share among the general populace. Microsoft 2.0 indeed.
The hypocrisy can be summed up on that single page:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains why iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad do not support Flash and why open standards are the future of the web.
This demo was designed with the latest web standards supported by Safari. If you’d like to experience this demo, simply download Safari.
The next keynote should just have two massive murals of Stalin flanking the podium while Big Brother Steve tells you what you'll be allowed to do with your own equipment. And when he announces that they are no longer preventing you from running certain applications, that will become a feature. I guess he did learn a thing or two from Mr. Gates.
That masquerades as Safari.
Shock! horror! Apple are using their own website to push Safari and claim that their own browsers are ahead of the game on standards support? The bastards!!!
In large friendly letters on the page in question (my emphasis):
The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.
Note how that doesn't say "Here's a handy resource to allow you to objectively compare different browsers' HTML 5 implementations"? That is because you are looking at an advert for Safari! As is traditional in these "adverts" it is trying to get you to download and try Safari, not find out how close the competition comes. In other news, if you go to a Mercedes dealership they're not going to offer you test drives in a BMW...
Wake me up if anybody smart enough to spoof their browser ID finds out whether Apple's demos use undocumented or non-standard features (rather than ones which don't work in Firefox, yet).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
When Apple says 'Standards' they do not mean documented requirements that exsist so that all may have access, but a 'You must be THIS tall in order to ride' enforced upon the user. *Clearly* Apple should not lower it's standards to serving just anyone.
They have the exact same demos on the Apple Developer site with no User-Agen sniffing involved. If you really want to try them and see if they work on your favorite browser, just go here.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
At the bottom of every page, there is a link to
http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary. Most people on that page are not going to understand why it isn't working, since they don't even know what browser they're using, unless Apple actually bars the door.
I'm using Leopard and I can't run the VR demonstration on Safari, but I can run it using the iPhone SDK on Leopard. I read on Wikipedia that "Apple quietly stopped providing software updates for Leopard."
The demos themselves work with html 5 browsers. Its just that apple have blocked all the other browsers from that link. If you don''t believe me try this link in google chrome http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ (they should all work apart from the video one).
At the bottom of every page, there is a link to
http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary. Most people on that page are not going to understand why it isn't working, since they don't even know what browser they're using, unless Apple actually bars the door.
The demos themselves are restricted, but the sample code is not.
it seems to be doing some sniffing now... viewing it from mozilla seamonkey, it just pops up an error about requiring safari as soon as you click "view demo" on any of the demos.
chromium-browser --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.1 Safari/533.4"
It actually took me a minute to figure out how to change Chromium's user agent string, lol
It works. I hope I don't contribute to the bitter argument between Apple Fanbois and Apple Haters - but it does work, if anyone really wants to try it.
Audio fails, probably because I don't have iTunes, and the VR demo fails because "This demo requires a browser that supports CSS 3D transforms." All the rest work just fine.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
This was the executive summary for general public consumption.
If you wanted to look at the demos on other browsers, all you had to do was go to the http;//developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ link. Again, not everything will work on non-safari browers but most of them will work on the latest chrome.
This is all about presenting the technology to the average user in the best light when other browsers are still playing catchup.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Embrace and Extend...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
An interwebs only accessible by apple proprietary software IS the future of standards they are looking for
In that demo, how did my browser know my exact latitude and longitude? That doesn't make sense to me. Did that come from Google or something (google maps on my cell phone?). Even then what does that have to do with the laptop I'm browsing from or this landline IP address? That's pretty damn scary to me.
Better known as 318230.
I'm wondering what was the point of Apple's demo pages. Seems like it's more a showcase of their products than HTML 5. Plus with the lock to Safari and the use of browser specific tags it looks like we're back in 1995 with the battle between Microsft and Netscape to *own* the internet... Pathetic.
To really show something interesting, here is a rewrite of the "360" demo done right:
http://www.warpdesign.fr/html4/showcase/threesixty/
It's HTML 4, just like Apple's demo, and will work in anything from IE to Safari/iPhone.
Getting modded up for describing HTML 5 as a proprietary format is beyond me.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Back when the iPhone first came out, and people were shrieking for native development, Steve Jobs announced his "sweet spot", which was the ability to write web apps for the thing (??). To support this position, Apple posted on their development site guidelines on best practices for modern web apps. These guidelines specifically advise against using browser sniffing (except under certain rare conditions which are not met here). One should instead use object detection.
Here are those guidelines. The document lists at length all the reasons not to engage in browser sniffing which are rehashed here. Basically there may be low or no correlation between the information in the user agent string and the browser's abilities. For example all browsers claim to be Mozilla, but it doesn't mean they all have the same feature set as Mozilla's Firefox.
Apple's developers who wrote this gallery appear not to have read this document, or more generally to understand the purpose of web standards at all. Apple's new HTML5 gallery touts standards, but it flouts all the goals of standards. The point of standards is that we can target a standard, rather than a browser. Apple violates the entire purpose, and deserves censure for this hypocrisy.
Safari is actually not a real browser!
xoda.org
The fact that Safari is required to showcase certain impressive features of the HTML5 should in no way detract from the developing standard. All it says is that the community as a whole still a ways to go--which of course isn't news, because we all know the standard isn't ratified.
Apple never said Safari is the only standards compliant browser. Apple doesn't even claim Safari is standards compliant. Such a claim would be tantamount to saying the standard is finalized and Safari has all bases covered, which is untrue.
This developer link should be modded to 5, even though it detracts from the anti-Apple message /. is trying to promote.
Sorry, /., but you're simply evil in this way.
After the customer base was established, Microsoft Works came in and locked everyone into a proprietary format
And how is Apple doing this? The webkit tags they are using, work in pretty much any up-to-date webkit browsers - which included Android or just about any other popular mobile device.
Apple is explicitly not locking you in, instead of going down that road they are strongly promoting a standard (HTML-5) and a powerful rendering engine (Webkit) that anyone can use.
Where's the locki-n?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
God, you stupid shit.
Isn't just for Microsoft anymore.
Apple is in this for themselves, just like they have always been about control. Their OSX runs on standard PC hardware, but they dont allow you to run it unless you buy it on Apple PC hardware (which is the same thing).
Talk about not supporting open standards.
Apple is the smoke monster. Stay away.
The fact that the /. moderators give your post a 5 and don't highlight the developer link which doesn't require UA spoofing shows how absolutely evil /. is.
expect anything less from Apple?
Also, /. is overrun with Macfags. Is there an A.I.D.F. newsletter I could join?
I hate flash ads, and so I block flash. Is there a way to do the same with HTML5-based ads?
So Microsoft Internet 5 cannot do HTML 5? Damn, who woulda thunk it...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The title of this "submission" indicates that author cannot read and does not understand basics of standards compliance. Everything in the demo adheres to HTML5 as it stands right now. Also this demo is a showcase for Safari's compliance to HTML5, so please tell me how Apple is breaking the the HTML5 standard as the heading states.
So Apple's poorly written plugins are ok, but Adobe's is not.
Interesting.
I hear the iPeople out there saying "Apple. Apple is better". No they are WORSE. Proprietary software and PROPRIETARY HARDWARE. Think IBM Mainframes baby.
It was odd seeing a Mozilla dev talking about them fully supporting HTML5. They may support almost as many features, but they all run like ass. Seriously, most HTML5 demos I see on Firefox aren't unusable because some feature isn't implement, but that they are just far too slow.
Safari's and Chrome's JavaScript engines are running circles around Firefox right now. I don't know why anyone interesting in HTML5 would even bother with Firefox. WebKit is eating their lunch.
The people or the companies? Both? When companies like Apple and Adobe develop "standards" by which they intend the public to subscribe, then to what end have they? Is it truly a path forward for humanity, which standards intend to ideologically define? Does the "standard" bring an acceptably broad implementation of some technology that brings economies of scale and simplicity of use and development to the people, or is it a means for a company to corner a market and profit considerably off of human behavior?
Someone said above "Apple is Microsoft 2.0". Can't disagree with that! Practically everyone is branded as Apple cattle (is there an iThing in your pocket?). Adobe is no different. To develop flash apps, you much purchase Adobe's development environment. We can't live without companies, but I propose that the companies should not dictate standards development. In this I'd hesitantly recommend government oversight. "Standards" should not be something companies profit off of, but instead guide company processes by which the companies can more easily create products that humanity can make use of quickly.
Which I believe is more or less a lose set of guide lines, (apologies to Capt. J. Sparrow).
Has anyone actually read the specification? and if so, where could an unwashed person like myself find it? Because I'm not seeing a Benjamin Franklin list of yes's and no's.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze/sid () Epiphany/2.30.0 Apple failed to block Epiphany. Chrome works perfectly using the default Epiphany userscript. Firefox fails. Why is Apple blocking other web browsers?
Well, duh. When Apple had 10% market share for their most successful product lines, of course they were all for standards! After all, standards mean that content targeted at the bigger players will also be accessible on their platforms.
But now that they themselves dominate mobile appliances, and are clearly aiming at expanding downwards? Why, those pesky standards let them open source freaks use Android or even Maemo to see all the same stuff that a paying iPhone/iPad customer enjoys, which is patently unfair.
I also get a "download safari" dialog on the pages linked from http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/
IMO and UA detection is not "appropriate" on any page that claims to be about web standards. I agree that the average Apple user might have trouble understanding, but even then, a warning or information page instead of a pathetic "download safari" plug would be just not quite so dumb.
On the other hand, this is just the nonsense Apple is known for, so I am a bit surprised that everyone seems to be so surprised.
Safari isn't the only browser to support 3D CSS transforms. QtWebkit also added support for accelerated transforms a little while ago. Yes, that's only two browsers, but it's a rather hard thing to implement considering how complex it makes drawing code (and in its implementation, might use OpenGL). See http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/05/17/qtwebkit-now-accelerates-css-animations-3d-transforms/
Apple is Microsoft 2.0
If you really believe this, you're probably so completely lobotomized that you won't be capable of understanding any distinction, so my followup post is probably pointless for 80% of you who spout this bullshit over and over and over again on slashdot.
For the rest of you who have some hope of being rescued from this misconception, however dim...
First off, just so it's clear -- particularly to the anit-fanbois who will undoubtedly struggle to do anything other than let the "you're just saying this because you're a fanboi!" completely overwhelm whatever capacity for thought they have -- distinctions don't absolve Apple of crappy behavior. I think they're being dicks. If you don't like Apple, fine. They're still not Microsoft.
Why? Because they don't have now and they've never had anywhere near the market power that Microsoft has. They don't even have a quarter of the mobile market. If you consider tablets competitors in a space also occupied by netbooks, they don't have a plurality of the market there, either. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of any arena in which they have plurality market share -- maybe the iPod at some point. Maybe.
And while they erect barriers to entry to sell on their products, they don't erect barriers to entering any market they sell in.
If Apple was Microsoft 2.0 -- if they had the market power MS had and the desire to use it -- you'd see them them:
* telling record labels and publishers that if they wanted to sell through the itunes/ibooks, they have to sell exclusively through the itunes store
* forbidding App Store developers from making/selling an app on any other platforms. You wanna sell Remember the Milk on the App Store? Can your Android implementation or else we'll ban your app. Or maybe just double our cut of your sales.
* telling carriers that if they want to sell the iPhone, they'd better not be selling other smartphones.
* buying up shelf space in retail outlets that sell smartphones/tablets so there's no room for other competitors
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Grow the frack up.
That just bears repeating:
No, that's not the point and it's also incorrect/irrelevant. The point is that HTML5 can/will support the behaviors displayed in the Apple demos. I think pretty much everybody here knows HTML5 hasn't been ratified, so it's technically not a standard. What apparently many people here, including yourself, don't know is that Safari is one of the best browsers around for HTML5 in its present state. (Safari was also one of the first--if not the first--main stream browser to pass the acid3 test).
The developer page loads just fine in Chrome, but you'll notice the demos don't work as well as they do in Safari. That would suggest Safari supports HTML5 better than Chrome--at least in the ways tested by the demos. So you see, talking about HTML5 compatibility right now isn't really relevant, but it is entirely fair for Apple to want to showcase what HTML5 can/will do and to coax users into using to Safari to see the demos properly.
Perfectly awful in other browsers. Why should Apple beg for trouble in its pro-HTML5, anti-Flash stance by allowing access to browsers that will make the demos look like crap?
We have standards in English for a reason, too!
Opera 10.5+ has its own 2D accelerated drawing engine, said to be so fast performing at software level that they don't even bother to do 3d things yet. If you try latest 10.5 or 10.6 alpha, you may agree that they did something after all.
Firefox should be already accelerated with Cairo, isn't it so? Also they got direct3d accelerated nightly builds.
BTW; Apple and MS, they are somehow forced to do such cool 3d acceleration on the latest operating systems _only_ and get away with it. On the other hand, Opera, Firefox, Chrome has to work fine on at least 1 generation earlier OS so they can't really say "We accelerated it but you need to use OS X 10.6/Win 7 to see it."
Adobe doesn't say HTML5 sux, they say it is not really mature yet and every browser has different implementation, e.g. there is no guarantee an Adobe Flash quality page replacement (with all UI tricks etc.) will work consistently across different browsers.
Apple, not providing a part of it (3d) unless you bought their latest OS with latest hardware (Intel) even if you have a pro graphics card should be the last company to set such a "demo".
Don't forget that Apple is also the company that were able to push trusted computing to the mass with a round of applause...
In case of Snow Leopard, he gotta give up his working powerpc mac and replace it with an Intel Mac.
While Steve Jobs and an idiotic lobby at Apple thinks otherwise, no person likes to throw away a working machine for installing a new OS.
In fact, lots of PowerPC Mac owners thinks about moving to Windows 7 since Apple managed to make them hate from the brand with such policies.
Over the years I was getting tired of the MS bashing so it is really refreshing to finally witness the birth of a new evil. Long live to Apple bashing!!! MS looks friendlier every day,
I'm estimating more like a year or two at maximum. Remember, this is not 2000, things are going at an accelerated pace, exponential, not linear. The iPhone will have same support as Safari for HTML5, so that's already a lot. When all the major browser start to support HTML5 more in the next versions, we will have a new revolution of web design at our hands. This will happen within the next year I say, max two years. And remember, we already have most of the basework done. When HTML4 was introduced back in 1997 (damn, has it been that long?), the web was still relatively young and very different back then. Server side includes, maybe some javascript, DHTML. Forms. Lots of forms.
GeoKone.NET
All tests except the last worked for me in epiphany, the official browser of the gnome project. Chrome and epiphany are based on webkit so the share the same internals as Safari. I hope that webkit developers will end up agreeing with Microsoft about common standards for the web.
The code that would become WebKit began in 1998 as the KDE project's HTML layout engine KHTML and KDE's JavaScript engine (KJS). The name and project 'WebKit' were created in 2002 when Apple Inc. created a fork of KHTML and KJS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit#Origins
http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html WJM
Jobs said he wanted the web to be open.
Well, he also said unlimited data for the iPad. You can see how far that got you.
It is called getting "Jobs'd". And you all love it.
Obviously you guys didn't get the message: HTML5 is Steve Jobs' standard. He gets to decide what is best because he is the only one that knows what is best. Got a problem with that? How many world's largest tech companies have you created? I think he knows a little more than you do so your opinion doesn't really matter.
So, to get this straight (There's been a lot of sidetracking and a metric ton of squabbling so far, so trying to distill this)
The demos aren't actually 'HTML5 strict' as is implied, as they use -webkit experimental directives.
Which means that in order to view them, Safari on OSx snow leapord is required.
Which means that Apple is making false claims in an effort to get people to use it's hardware and software.
Which really isn't very cool.
Did I get it right, in summary?
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Apple is closing it's code more and more, The problem is, they are developing devices, So unlike Microsoft, they could pretty much close everything they want. The future of the web according to Apple, Is owned by Companies - not the People.