In-Depth Look At HTML5

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."

Comments

The truth is

[devxo]

Browser makers finally need to decide on one codec or it will just lead to the situation we had in 90's with tons of codecs (or everyone will keep using Flash). Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used. It's too late. There will come another round after H.264 gets old - make sure open source and free codec is ready by then. Now lets just enjoy that we even have HTML5.

Re:The truth is

[Microlith]

Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used.

They can accept it all day long and want to distribute software that will encode and decode h.264, but where do you expect for them to get the money for the per-copy royalties from? Of course, being unwilling to push software that is inherently un-free is acting like a little kid.

Re:The truth is

[pipatron]

How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

So we should let a codec that has random guarantees of the future licensing of the codec be the main stream? Yeah sure, let's give them full power to charge us an excessive amount when theirs is the only kid on the block. If "it's everywhere" was a valid argument to give up, nothing new would be created. You need to start from somewhere if you want greater acceptance over time and there will always be a "it's everywhere" deal when you start something new from scratch.

Re:The truth is

[Rysc]

. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used

No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.

OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Well, pushing software that has no hardware support and provides no clear advantage to the end-user over H.264 is.. something. Pushing it only because it'll allow your corporation to dictate by fiat the possible business models for web video, that's something too. OTOH, acting like something that is "inherently unfree" is worse, regardless of useful it is, is pretty childish.

Re:The truth is

[Microlith]

Pushing it only because it'll allow your corporation to dictate by fiat the possible business models for web video, that's something too.

Like h.264, who have a whole schedule of royalties based upon your business model? The only one that gets a free pass, mind you, is free-streaming video.

OTOH, acting like something that is "inherently unfree" is worse, regardless of useful it is, is pretty childish.

So pursuing alternatives to royalty-encumbered standards is childish. Got it. Time to start paying for those software patents. Perhaps instead we should just give up on open source entirely, because using it and considering it superior in any way is childish in the face of even moderately useful closed source, proprietary solutions. Gotcha.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used

No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.

OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.

Exactly, that's why we all stopped using un-free MP3s.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

Since you mention codecs, Google just released a version of VP8 for the WebM project. The improvements are noteworthy.

Re:The truth is

[PhunkySchtuff]

H.264 is royalty free for Internet video that is free to end users (Internet Broadcast AVC) until at least December 31, 2016.
You need to pay a small licensing fee to use an encoder which Google would have to do with all the videos they encode on YouTube, but as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.

Now is not the time to be pushing a private agenda, now is the time to get on board with established industry standards and get something more open into the next round.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf

Re:The truth is

[Lennie]

How do you think H.264 started out ? With zero hardware support, this is where VP8 was a few months ago. Now they have a few hardware manufacturers that ship VP8 built in. Any many said they would do the same. The whole H.264 / VP8 debate is also about looking at the future not just now.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you buy a book written in disappearing ink?
"It's fine, you can read it right now, no problem!" ?

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

H.264 is open standard. It follows all the principles of being open. Open source people always say you can make money with open source - well, now MPEG-LA is doing that.

Re:The truth is

[devxo]

Not everything lasts forever. In fact, only few things do. You ate food yesterday and that ain't coming back. Nor is your ex-girlfriend. Sometimes you just have to move on and do other things.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.

Google already licensed the patents. It was included in Chrome up till version 8. They took it out to promote their company-owned WebM.

Re:The truth is

[hedwards]

I haven't heard of anybody claiming that should be the case for standards. What they typically advocate for is products like Crossover Office where you're paying for something that's nearly entirely made of open source code.

Re:The truth is

[Lennie]

Firefox and Chromium (non-Google-branded open source base of Chrome) are open source browsers, the H.264 license model does not fit well with the open source development model. For example when a Linux distribution compiles Firefox or Chromium, they would need to get their own license for all the users of that distribution. The license cost up to 5000000 annually. In the past only Chrome included H.264 and not Chromium, Google didn't want to seperately maintain that part of the code, thus they dropped support for H.264 from Chrome. Just get with the program, H.264 for all browsers is not going to happen.

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Like h.264, who have a whole schedule of royalties based upon your business model?

A consortium of 20 companies is far preferable to a single BDFL who effectively decides what will run on the web and what won't. A schedule of royalties is far preferable to the alternative, which is "I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."

Re:The truth is

[sexconker]

. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used

No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.

OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.

The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.
Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.

To suggest that end users should FIGHT for something INFERIOR just because it aligns with YOUR personal beliefs and Chicken-Little "the royalties are coming!" bullshit is absurd. The bottom line is that BROWSERS should not be decoding this shit themselves. A browser should merely connect to available codecs on the system. MS realizes this, and MS realizes that customers want something that works. So MS made the h.264 plugin for FF. Apple realizes that customers want something that works. So Apple, controlling the browser 99.9% of their customers use, made sure their browser could handle h.264. Whether or not Safari uses codecs on OSX/iOS or whether it comes with its own is irrelevant, since they control both except for the 2 people who actually use Safari on Windows. Opera supports h.264 when the system it's on supports it in an easy-to-access manner. Mobile devices with hardware h.264 decoding? Opera is able and willing to handle that, even though they still cry out for "open" codecs. Once again, Opera is the best choice.

So the hold outs are FireFox and Chrome. The vast majority of FireFox's waning user base won't give a shit because MS fixed the problem for them. Mozilla is holding out on principle. That's fine, but if they don't see that their stance is going to result in users dropping them in favor of other browsers, they're stupid.

Google is holding out because they don't want to buy into the MPEG-LA group. They could easily afford it financially, but they can NOT afford the hit to their public image, especially after taking such a vocal stance about "openness". In the end, someone will write an add-on for Chrome to do the same damned thing as Firefox. There will be an "app" for h.264 decoding on Android (released by Google, released by Google posing as someone else, or released by someone else) in the same fashion there is Flash on the web. This functionality could be bundled into an update for the Youtube "app", allowing the browser to easily tap into it, since most people still dissociate Google from Youtube and will be less likely to call them out on the flip-flop.

The end result will be OSStards screaming about h.264, and posting weekly FUD articles about impending royalty fees (which no end user will ever have to care about). They'll bitch and moan but they'll secretly install the plugin/app that makes shit work for them. All of 17 holdouts will actually browse the web in a manner that results in them unable to play h.264 content.

Re:The truth is

[Microlith]

A consortium of 20 companies is far preferable to a single BDFL who effectively decides what will run on the web and what won't.

Even when the "BDFL" basically puts it into the open and goes hands-off? They're just putting a video codec out into the open, not deciding what will and will not run on the web (in contrast to Adobe and Microsoft, who are and have tried, respectively.)

"I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."

I see this sort of sentiment leveled against open source software all the time, what makes it more true now than before?

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

I see this sort of sentiment leveled against open source software all the time, what makes it more true now than before?

No other open source vendors have a monopoly. Web video is Youtube and a minuscule fraction is everything else. Vendors only care about supporting YouTube. If Google is able to dictate the hardware codec your equipment is built with, by setting the codec of YouTube, then they can effectively force everyone else to use their format. People might invent better codecs than YouTube's, but it'll be impossible to bring them to market because the barrier to entry created by the "free" Google codec will make it too expensive for manufacturers to put on the hardware, or too cumbersome for average users to install.

The MPEG-LA actually has companies that sell real video gear, and they compete to make good video gear. Google doesn't give a fuck about how good video looks, they just want to know where the ads go. YouTube's monopoly insulates Google from competition from other players in the video market.

Re:The truth is

[sakdoctor]

Your universe is only free for 10^1000 years. After that you're going to have to pay royalties.

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Even when the "BDFL" basically puts it into the open and goes hands-off?

Is there some sort of covenant and indemnification to that effect? Is there a Community Process? Is there a way for people to work within the process and still compete on quality and have a practical way of delivering a better experience outside of it?

I mean, like Android, this is really the most bullshit kind of open sourcing. None of the benefits accrue to the end users, because almost none of the end users know how to code. All of benefits go to the releaser and its cadre, like the OHA; the open sourcing isn't done to foster innovation, it's done to burn the crops of the competitors. Apple open-sourced Darwin and Clang; they did it so no one could ever compete with them on a FreeBSD platform or low-level compiler again, allowing them a free hand to compete on the playing field they chose. Google's no different.

Re:The truth is

[Trufagus]

Why is this an issue for you?

You can host your videos in H264 and WebM and deliver whichever is supported to each client. Or, if you don't like that, you can just support one and ask your customers to install a plug-in. After all, there will be free H264 plug-ins for the browsers that don't ship with H264 support (actually, I think there already are). The only exception, of course, is iOS where users will not be allowed to use WebM, so I guess you'll go for H264.

On the other hand, when a browser like IE9 decides to not support half of the technologies that we are talking about, you don't have much recourse (short of asking them to switch browsers), so I would say that that is much more important to discussion.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great, but how are free software developers expected to license the patents?

Re:The truth is

[Microlith]

By using software patents loaded with royalties that make it impossible to redistribute software using them. Oh sure, Mozilla could pay for the royalties, but no one who distributed Firefox could do so anymore without stripping the h.264 code out.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Er. They aren't charging per file distribution fees now, but anyone who distributes a decoder still has to pay up to $5m/yr.

Re:The truth is

[mldi]

Why do they have to decide on one or the other? What's wrong with supporting both? If someone wants to pay commercial licensing for encoding h264, they can. If they have a tighter budget and need something free and open but still supported, they can.

Everybody wins?

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards. Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.

HAHAHAHAha! Bullshit! You need a new set of eyeballs if you think h264 is that much better than WebM.

You h264 trolls just need to accept the fact that Google isn't playing ball and since Google owns Youtube, that's all she wrote. H264 will wane and VP8 will slowly but surely win.

P.S., it's a codec, not a religion so, please get a life.

Re:The truth is

[MorpheousMarty]

So, exactly what kind of business model should Mozilla adopt to pay for h.264's licensing fees?

Re:The truth is

[bennomatic]

I'm right between your argument and the GP's. I'm annoyed at Google for indicating they're going to drop support for h.264 (they can afford whatever future royalties will come), and I'm annoyed at Apple for saying they're not going to support WebM (they've got the resources to drop a few lines of code into their products to support it). I mean, all modern browsers support JPG, GIF and PNG; why can't we support even two major standards without everyone getting in a snit?

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.

IE 6 was released on August 27, 2001.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

>5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.

On the web, the original 'language' attribute for the script tag was put in place for when other languages were ported to run in your browser. JavaScript was the default embedded language just until 'something better came along'. Although I've seen a few experiments done, fifteen years later your choice is still JavaScript or nothing.

I'd be rich if I had a nickel every time I saw something done in code that programmers thought was just a stop-gap measure until something better came along-and fifteen years later it's still in use.

Changes in standards typically take an obscene amount of time-just ask the W3C. Thing about how long it would take for all the companies that are heavily invested in H.264 to move off to something better if they started *today*. More than 5 years I'd wager.

Re:The truth is

[Khashishi]

How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.

Google already licensed the patents. It was included in Chrome up till version 8. They took it out to promote their company-owned WebM.

So in otherwords, they wrote a new browser from scratch and paid from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software?

Re:The truth is

[bloodhawk]

Actually yeah I would, especially if it was just a novel. It would actually make the book far more useful as then once I have read it I would have at least a usable notepad as apposed to the 3 rooms of my house with wall to wall bookcases that realistically never get touched once I have read everything on it.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a very poor analogy.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

H.264 is open standard.

Yes. Exactly! Its open in the same way a closed door is open.

To quote a poster at OSNews.com:

WebM: unencumbered by patents, free, Free, open source, can be implemented by anyone - wherever, whenever, however.

H264: none of the above, but instead of being developed by a single company, it was developed by a few big shots.

And somehow, H264 is more open?

So yes, absolutely, H.264 is completely open so long as you completely redefine what "open" means so as to make us ignore the man behind the curtain.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

Posted too quickly and forgot the reference for the quote.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

*WHOOSH*

Re:The truth is

[kiddygrinder]

pretty much everything you've said here is bullshit, why would any hardware/software player manufacturer go "oh, i support youtube, guess i'm done, people won't want to watch ripped dvds or their existing content etc etc etc".

Re:The truth is

[kiddygrinder]

it's a poor deal if you the alternative is food you can buy once and eat whenever you want until you get sick of it and delete it.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

I mean, like Android, this is really the most bullshit kind of open sourcing.

That is a complete bullshit statement and a complete lie. Propaganda much?

Android does accept input and patches. Not only have bugs I've filed been fixed, at least one of my recommended patches are now running in Android; which was first adopted by third party roms. As are hundreds of other patches and improvements. And no, I do not work for Google or a carrier.

Android absolutely is open source in the most literal sense. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant or an idiot with an agenda.

With your idiotic logic, Linux isn't open source because we don't all have the source and/or input into the bios and firmware of all the installed components.

Re:The truth is

[Draek]

it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.

We won't, and the whole point of standards is that we shouldn't have to.

This is not the time for you technophiles to go spreading your political agenda at the cost of everyone else, this is the time for us to unite and get it right the first time around with a proper, Free standard for the web, just as all its predecessors have been.

Re:The truth is

[Draek]

In the case of Apple it's politics: they really don't like competition, and the h.264 licenses ensure the barrier of entry is high enough they don't have to worry about some puny little dev team disrupting their marketplace with some shiny new browser.

In the case of Google however, it's *also* about politics, but a slightly different take: they really don't like monopolies and oligopolies, since they tend to make dirtying and eliminating Google their first priority (see also: Bing, iPhone), and putting a Free codec in the standard ensures the big guys can't use the h.264 patents as a club to squash smaller competitors with.

Essentially, it comes down to whether you like seeing the web in the hands of a few or not. If you were around during the IE6 days, I assume you'll understand if I say I'm on Google's side in this one then.

Re:The truth is

[Draek]

Because all it takes is for a single significant player to decide not to support one of the codecs in order for the other to gain dominance over the whole market. And since Apple went crying and bitching to the W3C that they weren't ever gonna implement a Free codec because they didn't wanna, we need a counterpoint for the WebM/Theora side in order to have a meaningful debate instead of the zealots going all "iOS doesn't support it, therefore it's dead". Not that it has stopped them, but at least Firefox and Chrome's marketshare has made the more rational elements pause for a bit.

And then there's the potential legal issues with a heavily patented codec for Free Software, both present and future.

Re:The truth is

[Draek]

It's one of the perks of operating a multi-billion dollar business: you can easily afford any paywall your competitors try to burden you with.

Sucks for everyone else, though, and thankfully Google is well aware of that.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to pay anything to provide support for pluggable codecs, which is something pretty much every OS provides. Then Firefox could simply play what is available and if the user happened to have an h.264 codec, regardless of how the user came in possession of it, Mozilla would not be responsible for it. Then the browser isn't tied to any specific format.

W3C HTML5 video draft does not specify a video format. The documentation spec as it stands provides markup to specify which codec to use and W3C seems to want nothing to do with locking the spec to any particular codecs. Internet Explorer and Safari both do this. The only reason Firefox, Opera and Chrome won't is political, plain and simple.

At the end of the day the question is simply whether or not you think Apple will bow to WebM/V8 support on iOS as there lies more influence and sway than the tech market can ever manage to muster.

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Nothing you say here contradicts what I said.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.

Pure delusion. The latest release of WebM almost completely closes quality gap. H.264 still has a huge lead in encoding performance. WebM has an edge in decoding performance. Given, as consumers, who have a primary need to decode, which makes more sense.

So basically we have more or less visual quality parity between H.264 and WebM. Hardware support is steadily growing for WebM which means battery life parity. H.264 is clear champ at encoding performance. WebM is pushing ahead of H.264 at decoding performance. For most devices, the later means superior battery life.

Contrary to you delusion, WebM looks to be offering H.264 some serious competition.

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Ah this is where you're wrong. It's all about controlling the streaming from large providers to set-top boxes, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu to AppleTVs, Rokus, and the (basically moribund, due to Google's incompetence) GoogleTV platform. The companies in the MPEG-LA and Google both see that streaming distribution will be the future, and that no one will rip movies in the future, because it won't be sold. Physical media's days are numbered. I will be extremely happy if hardware supports both formats, and more, but people up the thread are arguing for MPEG eliminationism, and that would be bad for competition and consumers.

The only question is, do you stand with the monopoly that sells you to advertisers, or with the cartel that sells hardware to you? I'll always vote for the people I buy things from directly over a advertising company.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

Yes, it doesn't contradict anything you said, except for the parts where you talked about Android.

Re:The truth is

[Salvo]

WebM still isn't ready for public consumption. By introducing the h.264/VP8 debate prematurely, Google have derailed the progress of HTML5.

Coupled with the stagnation of HTML5 YouTube and increased reliance on Adobe Flash in Google Maps, Stocks, Analytics and Android, it appears that Google have gone off HTML5. How long till Google Docs and gMail become Flash-based?

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

By introducing the h.264/VP8 debate prematurely, Google have derailed the progress of HTML5.

You mean by creating competition before a defacto incumbent could be entrenched, they stopped HTML5; which ignores video was a tiny, tiny element of the spec? WTF?

Coupled with the stagnation of HTML5 YouTube and increased reliance on Adobe Flash in Google Maps, Stocks, Analytics and Android, it appears that Google have gone off HTML5. How long till Google Docs and gMail become Flash-based?

So you're saying their open support for HTML5, such that they don't want to support flash vs a current need to drive their business can only be interpreted as support for flash? Paranoid much? You're conflating a business need now with a business need for tomorrow. They used what's available. They're working to change that for tomorrow. Someone you interpret very clear anti-flash behavior for being pro-flash to the detriment of themselves. How could you have possibly reached that conclusion?

HTML5 didn't exist yesterday. Flash did exist yesterday. Their only options were, use flash, create an entirely new technology which wouldn't be supported by other browsers, or push for a new standard. They picked the first option, to address current business needs and the third option to address tomorrow's business needs. I don't see the problem. Its the same decision any half way decent businessman would have made.

Re:The truth is

[__aazsst3756]

h.264 is an open standard, WebM patents are mostly owned by Google. Although since h.264 is a pool of patents, and many of the patents are very broad (sadly) several probably apply to WebM as well. The real push here is not for open standards, but free usage of those patents. h.264 has granted an indefinite free license to those distributing video for free. Those charging for video will likely have to pay royalties in the future whether they use h.264 or WebM (if the patent attorneys have their way). One is hardware supported, one is not. As an end user I simply want to keep watching video for free or cheap. Some business models may need adjusted accordingly.

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

The only exception, of course, is iOS where users will not be allowed to use WebM, so I guess you'll go for H264.

The problem with that is the market has changed and will continue to move away from Apple as a significant market segment. It used to be Apple and RIM where the only mobile platforms with clout. Now Android is pushing RIM out and eclipsing Apple in the numbers game. Which means, in the next couple of years to decade or so, if Apple doesn't support WebM, their owners will likely have an inferior experience which in turn likely means reduced sales which in turn quickly spirals into Apple supporting WebM or it becoming a dying platform.

Apple may not support WebM today but the writing is already on the wall they will support it tomorrow; either by sheer user demand or by falling market share.

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Where? Demonstrate:

Android does accept input and patches. Not only have bugs I've filed been fixed, at least one of my recommended patches are now running in Android; which was first adopted by third party roms.

Never said they didn't. They love it when people do their work for them for free!

Android absolutely is open source in the most literal sense.

It most certainly is, I never said it isn't. It's a bullshit kind of opensourcing, but that's just a qualification.

Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant or an idiot with an agenda.

You should restrict your comments to things I actually say.

With your idiotic logic, Linux isn't open source because we don't all have the source and/or input into the bios and firmware of all the installed components.

My "logic" has nothing to do with the definition of open source, it's based on competition. Google didn't want to compete with Symbian, Windows Mobile, or RIM, thus they released a phone OS for free, and now Symbian and Windows Mobile are dead, and RIM wheezes. This is all about eliminating competition through market dumping, except instead of China dumping cheap steel in order to bankrupt US producers, Google is dumping a free OS in order to destroy the cellphone OS producers. If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.

In general, as with so many of Google's ventures, they've perverted the competition for consumer purchases -- they simply give great service until they are the monoculture, and then the service to the consumer is indifferently better or worse, but people keep coming because it's the only realistic game in town, and Google then moves to the moneymaking: brokering consumers to content and service providers, taking their cut along the way.

Re:The truth is

[PaladinAlpha]

So you don't think Google is interested in the real money it could save by creating better codecs, allowing them to reduce bitrate for current quality, and saving them a tremendous amount of bandwidth?

Also, I take issue with this: "people might invent better codecs...bring them to market." Do you bring equations to market? No, of course not. You bring products to market. Charging for encoding/decoding is a doomed business model and it deserves to be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the age-old data format lock-in that companies more interested in profit than innovation (the very ones you are defending) have been pushing for years. That's what I and many other people here are trying to tell you -- open-sourced code is immune to this kind of treatment, because it can't be taken back or controlled; and when it grows large enough to attract a plurality of development, it becomes strong just on the basis of people not wasting time reinventing the wheel and instead contributing their effort to new frontiers.

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you will find that "market dumping" is the activity of selling goods below the costs of production in order to unfairly capture market share. Selling goods above the cost of production but below the cost of other players in the market is called "competition".

The cost of production (otherwise known as the marginal cost) of software is zero, therefore market dumping of software is not possible.

Re:The truth is

[kiddygrinder]

how is a set top box not a media player? just because the front end is probably running a html 5 browser doesn't mean they can't do whatever the hell they want with the codec behind the scenes, in fact they'll probably encode and stream it in whatever codec they feel gives them the most quality for their bandwidth, if the MPEG-LA want to stay competitive they'll have to . the idea that no-one will rip movies is just plain stupid and is a completely separate issue to whether physical media will become irrelevant. Who do i stand with? who cares. but currently we have a bunch of codecs and 90% of my media will only play on PCs, maybe an open source codec as the default will fix that, i'm willing to give it a try after the fucking mess that's occurring at the moment.

Re:The truth is

[Gravis Zero]

Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere

NAH AH!

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

Marginal cost != cost of production, and even if it were, that would be for an intellectual resource with no physical manifestation, that is never updated, and never serviced. Are you seriously claiming that Google spends zero dollars on the development, maintenance and support of Android?

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

I think Google is interested in providing the bare minimum quality required to keep the hits to youtube where they are. That is the extent of their commitment. Making 250,000 people with cellphones happy is far more important to them than making one filmmaker happy.

Also, I take issue with this: "people might invent better codecs...bring them to market." Do you bring equations to market? No, of course not. You bring products to market.

Software is a product. That's just where I come from on this one.

Charging for encoding/decoding is a doomed business model and it deserves to be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the age-old data format lock-in that companies more interested in profit than innovation (the very ones you are defending) have been pushing for years.

If you think an open-source codec will save you from lock-in you are mistaken. The locks will just move up the pipeline, to different parts of the business. The people who make the content will be the ones forced to use essentially whatever is the monoculture, because using a different standard will become impractical.

That's what I and many other people here are trying to tell you -- open-sourced code is immune to this kind of treatment, because it can't be taken back or controlled; and when it grows large enough to attract a plurality of development, it becomes strong just on the basis of people not wasting time reinventing the wheel and instead contributing their effort to new frontiers.

But you can't control YouTube or Hulu or a Roku. These are services and products, not code. You can hit "git push" until your keyboard breaks but it won't create a viable competitor to YouTube; just because the codec is "free" doesn't mean it's any easier for competitors to create their own sites, services, and codecs, in fact it makes it harder. Open source is great, but it tends to create monocultures where competition on price is impossible, thus the revenue ends up being derived from services. The end result is a situation like Mozilla's, which Google basically owns at this point, they're utterly beholden to them for search referral revenue. Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.

Re:The truth is

[clydemaxwell]

"I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."

this is outrageous. if there's no market, you don't have a viable business. that is no-one's fault. you seem to imply we shouldn't give things away because they'll hurt the market for expensive alternatives, which is so fundamentally bullshit it makes my brain hurt.

Re:The truth is

[naoursla]

How do you know that WebM is unencumbered by patents?

Re:The truth is

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.
Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.

Not really. It was when WebM was first revealed, but it's now close enough in performance that it's no longer an issue for users. H.264 will probably continue to be a superior format, in the same sense that Beta was superior to VHS... technically better, not not enough to make a difference. It's close enough that other matters than performance will decide the issue.

Re:The truth is

[PaladinAlpha]

You're assuming that algorithms are a product, which I am not convinced of. Video encoding is one of a class of problems which is not yet solved; i.e. we're constantly improving at it. Having a large target use an open-source tool attracts more development, not less; or, put another way, business dollars are not the only source of development funding.

Do you really think that a site driven by a qualitatively better codec couldn't threaten YouTube, especially if its lower bandwidth requirements lowered its costs? You keep talking about monoculture -- but surviving as a company because you have secret tools is hardly a strong business model. Tell me why there still exist compilers besides GCC, or web servers besides Apache, or heck, shells besides bash? By your theory, those should all be monocultures with no alternatives. Yet markets thrive around all of them. (Well, maybe not a financial market around bash, but a market nontheless *grin*)

Your way, there are a million development hours split across a hundred codecs. My way, those hours improve in the same place, and the people who want something different can still go and create it. Trying to introduce some kind of software socialism where the company gets to hide its toys so that people don't use them only leads to the situations that exist in the real software markets -- Microsoft on every machine. Now that's a monoculture.

Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.

They're free to accept it or not accept it. I tell you what, though, if I wanted a build of Firefox that changed the default page to Bing, I could do it, and run it, and no one would stop me. I could even make it a formal fork and distribute it for the people that wanted it. I can't imagine many would want it, so it wouldn't get much action. Why do you advocate "propping up" inferior, unwanted software? And why don't you try making a custom build of Internet Explorer?

Re:The truth is

[iluvcapra]

When did I ever say the competitor had to be more expensive? It can be free, all that matters is the google can outwait or outspend the competitor. H.264 will probably survive this, but a real casualty of this is Vorbis.

I think your brain hurts because he reflexivly assume that anything tha tis open source is virtuous and gives everyone everything they may want. The fact is that it almost never delivers viable consumer solutions, unless the project is the pet of a huge private company that shelters it's development and steers business it's way.

Re:The truth is

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

By using software patents loaded with royalties that make it impossible to redistribute software using them. Oh sure, Mozilla could pay for the royalties, but no one who distributed Firefox could do so anymore without stripping the h.264 code out.

You know who else could? Anybody shipping less than 100.000 units a year could do it for free, that's who.

Re:The truth is

[jrumney]

Well, pushing software that has no hardware support

This argument has no basis in fact. VP8 has started to appear in the lists of hardware accelerated codecs from most ARM SoC manufacturers already. Some even have firmware upgrades to enable it in chips they have already shipped.

Re:The truth is

[westlake]

How do you think H.264 started out ? With zero hardware support, this is where VP8 was a few months ago. Now they have a few hardware manufacturers

H.264 is supported by every digital HDTV system on the planet. It is studio production codec, a broadcast, cable and satellite distribution codec.

It is deeply entrenched in CCTV, commercial, industrial, medical, military and security applications.

Yes, VP8 has the support of a few hardware manufacturers.

But H.264 is suppported by Apple, Fitjusitu, Hitachi, JVC, Microsoft, NTT, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and Yamaha.

In the second tier, by the 953 H.264 licensees like LG and Vizio.

The whole H.264 / VP8 debate is also about looking at the future not just now.

Then you need to be thinking about the next-generation codec, HEVC/H.265, which should be ready in a year or two.

HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.

HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.{/quote> High Efficiency Video Coding

Re:The truth is

[indiechild]

On the other hand, Google has absolutely no problem pushing Adobe Flash. So obviously Google is quite flexible when it comes to these things.

Re:The truth is

[unapersson]

Why is Vorbis a casualty? I finally got an Android phone recently and it supported Vorbis right out of the box. My old Nokia never supported, not even the N800 tablet.

Re:The truth is

[tehcyder]

Do you really think that a site driven by a qualitatively better codec couldn't threaten YouTube,

Yes.

You are falling for the classic geek error of assuming that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. No, it won't. People still buy crappy, inelegant, not very effective mousetraps because they are cheap, and everyone knows what they do. .

Re:The truth is

[tehcyder]

Funny how people don't mind Google doing this, but everyone was outraged when Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free, thereby destroying Netscape as a business.

Re:The truth is

[Rysc]

The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.

I stopped reading here, nothing else you say matters if you're stuck on this point. Technical superiority is 100% irrelevant. Take a moment to read it again, maybe it will sink in. If it's illegal for e.g. Mozilla to use it, and it is, then it doesn't matter if it has some advantages--even vast advantages--over the thing that is legal for them to ship. Superior is nice, but royalty-free is king .

Re:The truth is

[GooberToo]

Please note, I said it is unencumbered, not that it doesn't have any. This is according to Google. Such claims are legitimate unless someone can prove otherwise. Seemingly such claims carry significant weight given the MPEG community's effort at trying to locate ammo. Its likely they've already looked fairly hard and have been unable to find anything which is why they went publicly shopping.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

No one is arguing for MPEG eliminationism and if they are, they're idiots. The argument is that HTML5 should list WebM as a base codec that everyone must support. The reasoning is that as long as you provide a WebM version, you're guaranteed that all users can view it. If you want to have an H.264 version or whatever other codec that's fine, but the standard should specify that everyone at least supports WebM.

The reason for not using H.264 as the common codec that everyone should support is due to the W3C's own rules that nothing in the spec should require patent licensing in order to implement or ship.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.

Why do I have to submit a patch to Mozilla? I can just fork the code, create my own version with the search set to Bing by default and distribute it myself. Done. Try having a version of IE where the factory default search is Google instead of Bing.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.

Except the actual market forces prove you wrong. The cost of an Android phone vs an iPhone vs a Windows Phone vs Symbian phone are all around the same. The customers aren't seeing a drop in price for a phone because the OS is free, so your argument fails because Android has outsold Windows Mobile, Symbian, and RIM due to people actually wanting them because they like them better. Whether it's the OS, the hardware specs or whatever, it's definitely not the price.

As for the barriers to entry among hardware vendors and whatnot, I can agree with you but that has nothing to do with Open Source or Android at all, it's a problem with the entire system. The fun part is that because Android is Open Source and Free, anyone can just take the Android code and fork it. They can give it a new name, rebrand it, whatever they like and just release it. You can't do that with Windows Mobile or a RIM phone or iPhone. If a company with enough resources decided to give it a go, they could definitely compete by using Android or by creating their own if they make a better product.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

You realize the problem wasn't because Microsoft gave IE away for free, the problem was that they used their position in the OS market to bundle IE with the OS and give themselves an advantage over Netscape.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

They have granted a free license for free web video streaming. If you give away a dvd or other video (ie not streaming via the web) you still have to pay.

If the patents they already had for H.264 applied to WebM, then the MPEG-LA wouldn't be publicly requesting the creation of a patent pool against WebM and asking anyone with patents they believe are essential to step forward. What that says is they don't have anything.

WebM has some hardware support, and the support is growing.

As an end user I simply want to keep watching video for free or cheap

So why would you want whoever is giving you video to have to pay? Or whoever is giving you your decoder to have to pay? or whoever is encoding the video you're watching? The only part of the chain that is free is for someone to provide a video for streaming. Whoever encoded the video had to pay for the encoder. Whatever is decoding the video had to pay for the decoder distribution. Etc. WebM is free for encoder, decoder, streaming, etc.

Re:The truth is

[PaladinAlpha]

It wouldn't have the first thing to do with people beating a path to your door, and lots to do with "what YouTube does, I can do for cheaper (less ads, more content) -- and better is just a side effect." You are falling for the classic error of having this idea that just because something is popular it is inviolate. Look at MySpace. That was a pretty thorough monoculture, and yet one quarter it just deflated. Facebook. Altavista. Geocities. Gawker. Are you really claiming eternally enduring web sites? Show me a website that has survived on something besides merit.

Re:The truth is

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.

Freedom is just another word for having no more than 100.000 downloads a year. Firefox is too big to be free.

Re:The truth is

[naoursla]

Google might be wrong when they say WebM is patent unencumbered.

If someone sues you for patent infringement for using WebM, is Google going to help defend you? Even if it isn't a valid complaint it could still cost you a lot of money.

Re:The truth is

[RocketRabbit]

Just a little quibble here:

People do not buy Android phones. They are given away "for free" with the contract. The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone.

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.

Freedom is just another word for having no more than 100.000 downloads a year. Firefox is too big to be free.

Wait....what? It's too big to be free? Says who? Firefox is free to download, free to modify, and you can submit patches and fixes and they'll get incorporated if they're good. So...how is Firefox too big to be free? Or do you think that since it has so many downloads it just "shouldn't" be free?

Re:The truth is

[zeroshade]

People do not buy Android phones. They are given away "for free" with the contract. The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone.

Perhaps I should ask Verizon for my money back when I purchased the original Droid early last year. Or what bout the cost of the HTC Evo? Or the other tons of Android phones which are at various price points which range from some "free" with contract to being at the same price point as the various iPhone models. Sorry, but claiming that "The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone" is just flat out bullshit.

HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

NYOM NOM NOM NOM NMOM

Re:HTML5

[Quiet_Desperation]

That's easy for you to say.

four-part series

[Anonymous Coward]

a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5

To quote American Pie... "Dude, that's a lot of work." Can you summarize in four sentences?

Something I've never understood about HTML

[Alaska Jack]

Why isn't there a "Caption" tag? (I mean for images, not for tables).

So if you had something like this:

<img caption="yadda yadda yadda" src='"blah blah blah">

Then the caption would be underneath the photo, with the photo and the caption treated as one block (i.e., with the body text wrapped around it the same way it is wrapped around the photo.)

I'm sure there's a good reason -- can someone enlighten me?

    - aj

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[drinkypoo]

The reason is that HTML doesn't have support for photographs. It has support for images. If you want to caption a photo it is trivial to do. Meanwhile, images have ALT text which does what you want except that presentation is left up to the browser.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[WiglyWorm]

You are thinking of title text. Alt text is intended for accessibility for screen readers and other non-image capable browsers. It is not a caption, it is an alternate .

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

[div class="photo"]
[img src="photo.jpg"]
[div class="caption"]
[p]Caption here[/p]
[/div]
[/div]

What's wrong with that? Plus in this model, you can embed HTML in the caption... and style it however you want using CSS.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[element-o.p.]

Also, the way you've described it, the caption wouldn't be a tag; it would be an attribute of the image tag:
caption as an attribute:
<img caption="yadda yadda yadda" src="blah blah blah">

caption as a tag:
<img src="blah blah blah"> <caption text="yadda yadda yadda">

</pedantic>

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

figure and figcaption

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Rizimar]

Probably because there would need to be additional coding to support a caption attribute. Browsers would need to determine the correct size and placement for the caption because it could throw off the image size. And it could be a headache for developers who want precision in their layouts. Would <img src="photo.jpg" caption="This is my caption" width="200" height="200"> still display an image that's 200x200px, or would it need to stretch/skew the image for the caption to be shown? Would the page's developer need to know how big the line/font height is of the caption to get that exact size?

The alt/title attributes can really help out with that because they replace the caption with mouseover text. Though, with CSS and HTML today, you can also simply add your image and a caption inside of a div element which can have specific sizing and placement which gives more control over how the caption is displayed.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[tomhudson]

Almost all browsers except IE already support ANY tag. Just stick it between < and >, then style it in css.

So you can already have a <photo>photo tag</photo>, a <crap>crap tag</crap>a <slashvertisement>slashvertisement tag</slashvertisement> etc.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Korin43]

Why isn't there a "Caption" tag? (I mean for images, not for tables).

So if you had something like this:

<img caption="yadda yadda yadda" src='"blah blah blah">

Then the caption would be underneath the photo, with the photo and the caption treated as one block (i.e., with the body text wrapped around it the same way it is wrapped around the photo.)

My guess is that it's not there because it would make the standard more complicated, and it doesn't add anything you can't do now (<div><img src='"blah blah blah">yadda yadda yadda</div>). Besides that, making it an attribute wouldn't make very much sense, because you'd probably want to be able to apply HTML to the caption. Making it the content of the img tag might make sense though (<img ...>yadda <i>yadda</i> yadda</img>), but that would make the distinction between the caption and the alt text confusing.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[spongman]

hypertext doesn't belong in attributes.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Alaska Jack]

You are technically correct -- the best kind of correct! Thanks. - aj

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[toriver]

... but for XHTML you would need to namespace it since it would be outside the HTML (default) namespace.

But I guess XHTML is dead now.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. The idiot asking for a caption tag doesn't know how to use XHTML and CSS properly.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that was CSS was invented for?

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[tomhudson]

... but for XHTML you would need to namespace it since it would be outside the HTML (default) namespace.

But I guess XHTML is dead now.

First off, it's not XHTML. It's just using the existing tags syntax, but with arbitrary tag names, and styling via css and manipulation via javascript.

Second, yes, happily XHTML has been dead for almost 2 years, according to the W3C - and they would know - they're the ones who killed it .

2009-07-02: XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5. Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the HTML Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C's position regarding the future of HTML.

The only people who cared are the XML nazis.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

why wouldn't the caption be between caption why make it an attribute?

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[gomek-ramek]

I've been using:
<figure>
<img ... />
<figcaption>this is a picture with a caption</figcaption>
</figure>

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't you make a class in CSS to control the style and blocking of text and image and apply it to the <div> tag?

Something like:
<div class="photoWithCaption"><img src="awesome.jpg">This is Mr.Awesome Smiley FTW!</div>

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you restrict the caption to be an attribute? What if I want more than plain text? What don't you like about
<figure><img ... /><figcaption> ... </figcaption></figure>
? It does exactly what you want, but the caption is real hypertext with styles, links, etc.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[Soukosa]

Except HTML5 continues to support to the XML serialization of HTML, so XHTML isn't necessarily dead. Which is nice because some of us actually prefer it over normal HTML.

Re:Something I've never understood about HTML

[tomhudson]

W3C recommends that people use html syntax only. Expect to see xml dropped at some point, since this is the "usual procedure" for doing that.

Who freaking cares

[Anonymous Coward]

about HTML 5! Is it really gonna make any of you happy?!? Here's an idea: forget about new tags and focus on getting drunk and fucking some new women!

Re:Who freaking cares

[Anonymous Coward]

some new women!

By, "new women", hopefully this time you mean someone other than your brother in a wig.

Re:Who freaking cares

[jandersen]

Wow, that is so deep! It blows my mind, it really does. I mean, wow...

Re:Who freaking cares

[element-o.p.]

:rolleyes:

Because I was smart enough to care about emerging technology in high school and college instead of sex and drugs, I now have a well-paying job that provided me with a very, very nice house in one of the nicer parts of my town, the perfect motorcycle for my needs, an airplane, a late model truck and a (modest, granted) recording studio in one of the extra bedrooms in the aforementioned very, very nice house. As if that weren't enough, I have a smokin' hot wife and a daughter who makes life worth living, even if I didn't have any of the material possessions I mentioned first. Life is good. So, yeah, I'd say HTML5 probably will make some of us happy.

YMMV. Keep drinking cheap beer and chasing skirts while living in your mom's basement if you want, but when you find yourself old, fat, broke and alone, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Re:Who freaking cares

[Anonymous Coward]

So, yeah, I'd say HTML5 probably will make some of us happy.

Only if you hail from Bangalore.

Re:Who freaking cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the insult master!

Re:Who freaking cares

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

about HTML 5! Is it really gonna make any of you happy?!? Here's an idea: forget about new tags and focus on getting drunk and fucking some new women!

Tell us about the drinks you drank and the new women you nailed after clicking submit!

Re:Who freaking cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you imply your life would not be worth living without your daughter? It sounds like you have lots of love and interesting physical and intellectual hobbies. Not to mention the hot wife.

HTML5 figure and figcaption tags, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, HTML5 (the topic of this story) does have support for 'photographs' and other figure content:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figure.asp

And thus captions:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figcaption.asp

Re: In-Depth Look At HTML5

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an In-Depth look at HTML5 right now... porting my stuff to awesome WebGL...

I am optimistic that, after 20 years, bullshit like Flash and proprietary codecs are finally going to die in a fucking shitstorm that caught fire

DO IT: http://nightly.mozilla.org/

I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[erroneus]

I recall when the web was young people would claim "I program in HTML!" I was like "yeah, I can insert 'bold' and 'a' tags too..." In the beginning, HTML was nothing more than what the name says it is -- a markup language. (Of course "language" somehow means programming? No it doesn't...)

Well, now things are different, of course. Web programming today is real programming for some... still markup for others. But now the web is becoming more than a presentation medium which is very exciting I think.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[trollertron3000]

I'm still not in love with client technologies but I knew they were powerful when I first dug into "DHTML" and created an animation using nothing but html and js. Essentially it's still the same recipe, with server-side powering the whole thing. Good times.

But yeah, agreed. I used to scoff at the title myself but these days I'm in awe at the power of "UI programmers" who well versed in both client side and design elements. They code JS, they do graphics, they know design, they write server-side web APIs, and they're experienced in "Rich Internet" development like Flash and Silverlight. It's downright impressive.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[H0p313ss]

It's downright impressive.

Until you start using it and discover it's all smoke, mirrors, duct-tape and baling wire.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Lennie]

I don't know how it is in the US, a lot of the time this is all self-taught. Because pretty much no-one seems to teach HTML/CSS/JS/etc. properly in school/university and so on.

Javascript is one of the most used programming languages and because it looks simple or familair most people assume it is, but in reallity it is the probably the least understood language by frequent developers. Most have no clue what prototypal inheritance is for example.

Also the Javascript name is just a marketing ploy because it has nothing to do with Java.

The core of the language is very small and was created and working in just 10 days.

It is a functional programming language with a C-syntax.

With the recent creating of node.js (a fully event-driven framework for writing network programs) Javascript has also become much more populair on the server.

Node.js was created in 2009 and is already almost the most watched project on github.com for example.

There introduction video where the creator/author explains what it is about:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=dahl-node

So it is just an event-loop just like a webserver like nginx.

One of the design goals is actually:

The API should be both familiar to client-side JS programmers and old school UNIX hackers.

I guess that applies to me twice. :-)

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[trollertron3000]

That's what's most impressive! It's like playing wack-a-mole with browser issues.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Sla$hPot]

The fact is that nothing has really changed over the past 10 to 12 years. Regards to what you can do with HTML and JavaScript.

Before XmlHTTPRequest there was remote scripting via JAVA sockets.
Before Canvas there was VRML and SVG. The later now in IE9
Some used the div tags to paint charts and figures.
Some when even further creating a bizare technique using borders to create 3D http://www.uselesspickles.com/triangles/

But today it seems that all the major browser vendors are finaly accepting HTML as a common web platform.
Which is really good.
It makes you believe that web is gonna bubble again. And stay bubbled!

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[roadsider]

As a web designer who started as a print designer before the web was invented and even before the advent of desktop publishing, this whole meshing of coding and designing represents a kind of repudiation of the concept of WYSIWYG.

I took to the web design relatively easily, but only because HTML looked very similar to the same code used by the old digital phototypesetting machines made by Compugraphic, but early on, we all seemed to hope for that "killer app" that would finally get us away from the code. To me, designing a page in HTML was like doing a page layout working in Postscript. When GoLive and Dreamweaver finally appeared, that looked possible and some cases doable, but not with the advent of CMS. (Adobe destroyed GoLive and Dreamweaver is so complex, only a coder can figure it out, and a coder doesn't need it). Not really.

And now, I look at HTML5 and I see WYSIWYG threatened even more. Seems like the technology is advancing faster than left-brain types like myself can ever keep up, or the design software industry (read Adobe) can accommodate them.

I've never met a coder who knows a damn thing about design. I learned how to tinker with code just to stay employed, but the thought of designing in it makes my eyes glaze over.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[LordLucless]

And good riddance. "WYSIWYG" programs invariably generate a spaghetti-like mess of a page that could had no semantic logic, and could only be practically modified by using the program in question.

You don't design in code. You design with Photoshop (at least for the final version) and then hand it over to people who understand code to implement.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 is the worst kind of stop-gap technology. At best, it is a working prototype for a real api.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[js_sebastian]

And good riddance. "WYSIWYG" programs invariably generate a spaghetti-like mess of a page that could had no semantic logic, and could only be practically modified by using the program in question.

You don't design in code. You design with Photoshop (at least for the final version) and then hand it over to people who understand code to implement.

Sure, but what about that vast majority of web pages out there which are not developed by a whole team of specialized professionals? I know a few people who do some pretty good web design, and none of them sketch it up and hand it to a dev team. Unless your web page is really a complex application that happens to run in the browser, one web designer is quite enough to produce a professional-quality webpage,

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Woops, posting to undo mod.

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Anonymous Coward]

FrontPage 2002 generates <font> and <embed> tags (instead of CSS and <object> tags), puts later edits to the beginning of the document in the <head> section, uses "webbot" and conditional comments, has proprietary ActiveX objects with a horrible <param name="XMLData" value="fifty lines of "office open" XML with tons of ampersand-escaped tags"> to embed excel spreadsheets (instead of using an HTML table), uses <table> for formatting, mixes HTML <br> style and XHTML <br /> style tags in the same document, and leaves about 40 lines of blank space in the HTML document whenever you delete something. I'd be embarrassed to ship HTML made by FrontPage in case someone decided to click on "View Source." No wonder so many of these autogenerated HTML documents have Javascript to block right-clicks!

Re:I used to laugh at "web programmers"

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a functional programming language with a C-syntax.

It's not functional. Haskell is functional, javascript is imperative. It does have first class functions though.

Cool, but...

[grimsweep]

There's been a lot of talk about HTML5 transforming today's browsers into tomorrow's platforms as this simple search suggests. Essentially, with all of these additions, there seems to be a keen interest in providing "local application" experiences to web-based tools. For example, many of these additions essentially provide access to hardware devices in one form or another.

This is all nice in theory, but once we start including the 'kitchensink' tag, who's to say that browsers won't end up as bloated as Adobe Reader?

Re:Cool, but...

[calmofthestorm]

And with as many security vulns. I really hope site sandboxing featuers become easier to use too. Currently I use a separate browser profile for unsavory companies like Facebook but as all these apps bleed together it would be nice to have a clean, easy to use separation feature.

Re:Cool, but...

[skids]

Well, despite the fact that XML and HTML are abysmal markup languages, they are a heck of a lot better and more consistent than the off-the-cuff designed-by-horses carnivals you find in PDF and other markup languages that started as internal document formats for proprietary word processors. Consistent design leads to more well organized, less complex code.

In addition, since HTML5 is coming with declarative animation features embedded, and on the heels of active use of the DOM, it has to be designed with performance in mind -- so there's a counterweight for the tendency for bloat to accrue.

That said, with HTML looking to become a "living standard" after HTML5 or in other words, complete anarchy, there will be space for a streamlined markup language to make gains again in another half decade or so -- if someone can finally produce something that doesn't suck for human readability and for complex relationships that transcend tree structures. Perhaps we will have the first popular non-textual markup language by decades end.

Re:Cool, but...

[Nadaka]

Well, I am fed up with xml and html specifically. I had my hopes set on xhtml2. I had even started working on tools for it. That got screwed over by the mess that is html5. I would love to create something even leaner and cleaner than xhtml2. But html is now a titan, I don't see room for anything to gain significant use.

What do you mean by non-textual? a markup language that can only be assembled in an WYSIWYG IDE?

Re:Cool, but...

[Lennie]

There is already a kitchensink in the specification. Although at this point it is only an image: http://images.whatwg.org/abstract.png http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/ Anyway support for the device-tag is planned for the next big update. The device-tag allows access to the webcam (like Flash currently does), serial ports (so you can use your barcode reader with your webapplication), but also supposedly USB-stick-fileaccess (maybe useful for something like ChromeOS ?) and so on. Yes, yes, all with a banner at the top of the browser "would you like to give this website access to the filesystem of your recently plugged in USB-stick.", bla, bla.

Re:Cool, but...

[skids]

Well, there's always YAML to extend....

What do you mean by non-textual? a markup language that can only be assembled in an WYSIWYG IDE?

Personally I've always thought graphical languages should be more like a free-form spreadsheet than those glorified text editors we call IDEs. No I do not mean WYSIWYG, except maybe where it makes a lot of sense to do so on small fragments, because the idea of a language, as opposed to an editor, is that you are looking at the underlying representation, not the final product. But yes, I do mean "not in a text editor."

Re:Cool, but...

[Randle_Revar]

>That got screwed over by the mess that is html5.
It got screwed over by sitting in committee and going nowhere (and the bit that did happen did not please the potential implementers), until finally the browser makers said "fuck it, we'll do it ourselves"

The future is here ( since the nineties )

[Sla$hPot]

Remember HTML5 is the new HTML...Some say it the other way around :) http://blog.whatwg.org/html-is-the-new-html5
Anyways It's called HTML from now on.

Discovery

[amicusNYCL]

While an in-depth look at HTML 5 is really cool and all, does anyone have a link to a video of Discovery's approach and landing? I found one on space.com but it's only 1:30 and doesn't have a lot of the chatter between Discovery and control.

Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the story about the actual HTML5, the formalization of how to interpret all the tags that were already there in HTML4? That's where most of the effort and time has been spent...

Re:The truth about Microsoft

[mcneely.mike]

So we should let Microsoft that has random guarantees of the future licensing of their operating system be the main stream? Yeah sure, let's give them full power to charge us an excessive amount when theirs is the only kid on the block. If "it's everywhere" was a valid argument to give up, nothing new would be created. You need to start from somewhere if you want greater acceptance over time and there will always be a "it's everywhere" deal when you start something new from scratch.

Same argument... this is why i use gnu/linux.

Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the most colossal waste of time ever undertaken by the human race.

HTLM5 does nothing to address the underlying syntax quirks of what can hardly be called a language, nor does it fix the PITA problems inherent to trying to make a stateless system have a state.

MS has a lot to answer for by killing the JVM equipped browser, but I think the ensuing years have seen us at the mercy of a standards committee that has no idea what a standard is or how to push through real changes that would enrich the browser experience.

Server Side Validation

[thirdpoliceman]

I'm not sure if the form validation is such a great idea. Sure, it will save a lot of time and headache, but there is nothing stoping unscrupulous and technically knowledgeable people from sending whatever data they want to the web server. I guess 99% of the time if you use client side validation you'll be ok, but I would feel obliged to still check everything on the server side. I guess having the specific form elements to validate email addresses and constrict dates is very nice. I suppose it doesn't hurt anything to have those new elements, as long as sever side validation doesn't get forgotten about.

HTML5 is nice and all...

[Wyrd01]

but what about good old VRML?

I remember hacking around with it a little back in college, but it never really went anywhere. Seems like we finally have the bandwidth and processing power to make this a "reality".

Looking great

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML 5 is brilliant, I am also very impressed with wallaby by adobe for converting flash into html 5! How good is that, me and the guys at http://www.absolutewebdesign.co.uk/ can't wait to get using it consistently in our web design work!