Apple Promotes HTML5, First iPhone Game Demo in HTML5, and More

[reanimate]

Hai guys, thought I'd jump into this discussion and share a thought, or maybe more accurately concern I just had, since there are so many smart people here.

First let me say that I totally applaud Apple's efforts to push the state of the art forward with these demos. I view them mostly as demos of what you can achieve in Safari, designing web apps FOR the iPad/Pod/Ped People whining because they need to click a button to go through to the developer's section to view the demos on Chrome instead of Safari are being pretty frivolous in their critiques. These code samples aren't targeted at Chrome or even the desktop per se IMO, but at mobile and specifically Apple mobile.

What I am increasingly concerned about though, as someone in the design/dev space who supports HTML5 and would like to see it go mainstream on the non-mobile web soon (as in next couple years soon, not next couple decades) is how to manage the process of backwards compatibility. I think this is a much bigger problem than people currently realize, and it has nothing to do with say, Safari having slightly different capabilities than Firefox, or even IE lagging in supporting HTML5 at all. Those differences are real but they can and will be easily bridged in a short timeframe. Instead the BIG elephant in the room IMO is...drum roll please...Windows XP.

A lot of people are pinning their hopes on IE9 as the point where the vast majority of browsers finally get on the same page regarding HTML5. IE9 is due out sometime next year. It will support HTML5, well, at least most of it (as far as I know Microsoft still hasn't committed to supporting CANVAS). And you get a sense of optimism looking at how quickly some browser vendors (Chrome and FF in particular) have been able to push updates out to their users. So there's the potential at least, if Microsoft adopts those tactics, for IE9 to grab major market share from IE8 once it's out there.

Except...there's one lovely little tidbit regarding IE9 that has barely been discussed to the degree it should be: it doesn't support Windows XP. At all. Think about that for a sec. It might be hard for your average Mac user to conceive but OVER 62% of the world's computers still run f*ckin XP according to this: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10 Largely because no one liked Vista.

Now how long does it take for all those XP users to go out and upgrade to Windows 7? Hell if I know, but I do know it will take a lot longer than the switch from IE8 to IE9.

So does anyone have any thought on what that might mean? Are we doomed to develop for a multi-tier, progressively enhanced web for some time? What about projects that NEED HTML5 to perform primary functions? I wonder if the concept, which hasn't existed much up til now, of offering web-based apps and businesses only for a subset of the entire web population might actually take hold. Or is the answer to try and "patch" XP browsers (as Google as been doing with the excanvas project) and simply built those capabilities into them?

 

[jamiek88]

Fair play to Apple at least when they are saying 'we have two options; html 5 which is open and app store which is closed' they aren't just waiting for html 5 to just 'happen' they are actively pushing it.

Forget the flash argument for a second. But in an ideal world wouldn't a truly open (except for codec for video but that is the case with flash and silverlight too) alternative to the app store and flash be the way forward? That works on all mobile platforms? Flash cannot logically be a long term answer and if we have these half measures and prevarication it just draws out the process.

I just see Apple as adding impetus to the inevitable, hopefully they can accelerate things especially as google and microsoft (sliverlight apart) are fully behind html 5 standardisation.

Apple are uniquely situated to do this and weather the storm because they are run as an autocracy.

I can understand Apple wanting to really control the app store, people associate those apps with Apple and their brand. People generally understand that websites are not made by Apple should offensive content (whatever that means to that person) be stumbled upon by a child/teen etc they are not likely to blame apple.

Plus porn hub already works anyway. So whatevs.

 

[macsmurf]

I wouldn't worry about Novell and it's Mono stack. Novell is courting buyers to avoid going bankruptcy. So far, they aren't getting what they want--high priced offers and you might be seeing them disappear sooner, rather than later.

Swooosh! Way to miss the point.

 

[chris200x9]

This is only a technical demo. nothing in the HTML spec prevents a linux browser to work. Yes there is. http://www.google.com/search?q=webk...s=org.mozilla:sv-SE:official&client=firefox-a


Care to provide proof?

does anybody read anymore? Just asking, he said there is no safari for linux and you reply with a link to webkit. webkit != safari! I just tried it on linux with a webkit browser and guess what? It told me I needed safari. So can you please link me to safari for linux. What? You can't? I'm so suprised

 

[petsounds]

"Please install Safari to run these HTML5 demos" ...as if Steve is trying to say that HTML5 is Apple's technology. Ridiculous. This kind of fractured standards war is exactly what happened with DHTML, and exactly why Flash became so popular in the first place.

 

[dnguyen]

will this take over flash?

 

[grapefruitx]

This thing only works on Safari. Whilst I agree that this is where the web needs to go, Browsers should execute this stuff directly, Jobs is right to call out Flash but he's loosing the argument, this demo site will only run in Safari not because it is HTML5 but because it uses bits of HTML5 specific to Apple

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/04/apple_html5_showcase_hype/

OK the Register make great sport out of sticking one on on Apple and Steve Jobs. But Apples dislike of Flash is more about controlling the platform (iphone) than embracing Open standards.

 

[Fireburst]

Crashed my iPad but worked on the second attempt. Not sure if this is going to be the holy grail but as HTML5 is still in beta we can hope.

My biggest concern is that once HTML5 is ratified and released we may be stuck with no updates for 6 or so years (open standards update very, very slowly) and by this point all competing solutions (such as Flash) will have moved on to much better things.

 

[jimmyjoemccrow]

As someone who is constantly impressed by the technical knowledge of people here, I'm amazed at how quick some people are to write off a technology that is still in it's infancy and isn't even supported by most browsers, yet. It's seems petty and biased, quite frankly. It doesn't work perfectly? Gee, are you actually surprised? It's still in it's infancy. How good were the first incarnations of Flash? Hell, it's been years that it's been THE way to show movie clips and graphics and it's STILL buggy. No one is saying that HTML5 is ready to replace Flash, yet, but the idea is that it will eventually be able to do anything Flash does. Why do some one you not get that?

Steve Jobs is saying it.

 

[jimmyjoemccrow]

Here we freakin' go again.

It's not just Apple v. Adobe. Other handset manufacturers have shied away from Flash. Heck, the Mozilla Foundation removed Flash support at the 11th hour from Firefox Mobile for Maemo devices. There isn't one mobile device/platform that is including Flash on a widespread basis.

This is entirely Adobe's fault. And it wasn't just an anti-iPhone reaction. They have failed miserably for years in writing a Flash plug-in that works effectively on mobile devices. Any mobile device, not just iPhone. The iPhone shipped three years ago and there were other smartphone devices that preceded it.

Adobe saw this coming and did nothing about it. Adobe claims that they will ship something of release quality by the end of this year, 3.5 years after the original iPhone shipped. That's an eternity in this industry.

Adobe is either lazy or incompetent. Take your pick. But the longer this drags out and the more defensive Adobe's retorts get, the more incompetent they appear.

Safe to ignore.

 

[jimmyjoemccrow]

Anyone willing to post a video of these sites working on their iPhone? youtube is very poor for this.

Here is a comparison of Flash vs HTML5 on the Nexus One:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUWo19BcC7s

However I can't be sure if the guy is a Flash developer since his accent makes it hard to tell what he said his job was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NlYsbA4OzU

difficult to see what performance is like but the kid mentions twice that HTML5 video eats battery life (surprise surprise) and still has a lot of glitches.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0wfQBOaSKM

This one looks pretty good. Smooth scrolling and playback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRwl75CpluY

Another good one but pretty basic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCNC1tcb7LA

Bad. Glitchy and jerky when he scrolls it.

My own tests on my iBook showed that the same video in HTML5 was jerky while in Flash it was smooth. That's not an ARM processor but it is a relatively low power device (1GHz PPC) suggesting that HTML5 will not be any better than Flash on mobile devices.

All those saying that HTML 5 is in its infancy are just providing an argument against Jobs case. It's not widely implemented yet in all browsers, it seems still to be buggy and the details are not agreed upon.

 

[Gepper]

The terms of use for the iPhone SDK prohibit anything(!) that is able to execute code downloaded from the internet.
So there is no chance to get Flash, Java, .Net or any other similar runtime on the iPhone. No matter how "good" no matter how fast, comfortable or energy efficient it is. Even if Adobes current Flash plugins are "less than optimal" they could still make a better version in the future or even somebody else could do. But Apple does not allow any such stuff on the iPhone.
There is also no (officially documented) way to install plugins of any kind on mobile Safari.

Christian

I was however talking about Adobes track record on the OS X platform. Ie. they had the API's avaliable for a long while to speed up flash but didn't do it.

 

[Arnia]

I think anyone wold be hard pressed to argue against your points. I also haven't seen anyone (worth talking about) arguing against HTML5 except to say that it isn't there yet, which is undeniably true.

Except I think that it is there, for certain things. As much as I may, idealistically, have wanted XHTML 2 to replace HTML 4 it is something that, pragmatically, HTML 5 gets right. It doesn't break existing browsers. Right now video needs a Flash fallback for browsers that do not support the video tag, but people have already built abstractions that handle that for you. Likewise, people have implemented SVG and MathML rendering in browsers that don't support it; even the canvas tag's immediate mode graphics.

Now, these are workarounds, but such things are inherent in any adoption process. If we were designing well (according to best practices over the past decade) then we should have a design that is functional even when stylesheets are turned off. These features should, when deployed generally and without knowledge of or concern of the browser demographics for your site, be used to add to the design rather than become the design.

Some of Jobs' points in his open letter were also somewhat reasonable. At All Things Digital, Jobs explained that Apple has a tendency to not support technologies on their way out. That is all fair enough, but when Apple decrees that all iPhone apps must be done in C, C++, Obj-C, or JavaScript via WebKit, he is no longer "not supporting" but is instead actively blocking, with is a different thing altogether. Not only that, he is blocking other companies such as Novell and Unity, which I believe is ultimately bad for the platform, and he hasn't even got the decency to tell them and their customers whether they are in or out.

I don't think such a hard line can be drawn between 'supporting' and 'blocking'. By allowing third-party layers, you do commit to supporting them in the sense of not breaking them, because breaking them would hurt your actual customers impression of you. This means that engineering decisions have to be made with them in mind, and resources have to be committed to testing these platforms as well. I wouldn't feel so wary about such things myself, except that my experience of software development has taught me that it is at the boundaries of systems (like between Flash's internal assumptions and the Obj-C runtime) that misunderstandings and (therefore) the trickiest bugs occur.

I think the question we need to ask ourselves is; do we want more flexibility in development, faster evolution of the platform or more maintainable software? We can pick maybe two of those three, and accept the third as the trade-off. I think a better argument against Apple could be made by people if they acknowledged that such a trade-off exists.

Now, I do believe the App Store needs more transparency in its processes and some way to check the viability of an idea before investing resources in it. This is a very difficult problem however, and no solution comes immediately to mind, so I can't really criticise Apple for not having a solution yet; it would fail to be constructive and I don't even know if there is an acceptable solution.

So there is a couple of discussions going on plus an enormous amount of fanboy noise pratically ensuring that the more interesting conversations won't take place in this forum.

I don't like the term 'fanboy' because it is often an ad hominem attack used to provoke an emotional reaction. What I do wish is that people would acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world, with imperfect people and imperfect solutions. Everything is about trade-offs. Sometimes these trade-offs benefit you, sometimes they don't. The best way to convince someone that they've made the wrong trade-off is to acknowledge that the trade-off has happened, but that the balance was wrong for some reason. Emotive attacks just diminish one's perceived significance.

 

[MorphingDragon]

"Please install Safari to run these HTML5 demos" ...as if Steve is trying to say that HTML5 is Apple's technology. Ridiculous. This kind of fractured standards war is exactly what happened with DHTML, and exactly why Flash became so popular in the first place.

No steve isnt saying it, its people like you shoving it into his mouth by the shovel full.

DHTML is not a standard, nor is it dead or weak.

 

[Gepper]

does anybody read anymore? Just asking, he said there is no safari for linux and you reply with a link to webkit. webkit != safari! I just tried it on linux with a webkit browser and guess what? It told me I needed safari. So can you please link me to safari for linux. What? You can't? I'm so suprised

I don't get it, Safari as the build they provide for OS X is webkit + Safari UI. If you want the browser (ie. webkit) on linux just build the damn thing. Yes, the UI will be using QT/GTK/whatever but the damn rendering engine will be identical.

The demos Apple posted have a safari restriction on them just to make sure people see the stuff Apple intended to, and not broken pages due to other browsers not implementing the features they are using *YET*.
If you build a webkit browser on linux and spoof the useragent you will be able to see the page just fine and dandy.

 

[macsmurf]

Except I think that it is there, for certain things. As much as I may, idealistically, have wanted XHTML 2 to replace HTML 4 it is something that, pragmatically, HTML 5 gets right. It doesn't break existing browsers. Right now video needs a Flash fallback for browsers that do not support the video tag, but people have already built abstractions that handle that for you. Likewise, people have implemented SVG and MathML rendering in browsers that don't support it; even the canvas tag's immediate mode graphics.

Now, these are workarounds, but such things are inherent in any adoption process. If we were designing well (according to best practices over the past decade) then we should have a design that is functional even when stylesheets are turned off. These features should, when deployed generally and without knowledge of or concern of the browser demographics for your site, be used to add to the design rather than become the design.

Yes, you want it to degrade nicely but to what end? If we look at the demo, it runs pretty well in Safari on OSX/win. On Windows, video doesn't work before you install a plugin. On Chrome certains things do actually work and seem to be consistent with Safari but audio works on OSX and not on windows. Most of it shows something on firefox but it looks weird and doesn't really work right.

Now, someone posted this cool player that degrades to flash: http://jilion.com/sublime/video

This runs great in Safari and Chrome for Windows. In Chrome for OSX, not so much.

Of course, you can forget about these demos running on any flavour of IE.

So the question becomes: Why even do it in HTML5 when I'm going to do the same thing in Flash anyway at this point to get a consistent result what works for 90% of customers? I'm not saying you can't get consistent results across HTML5 supporting browsers but lots of quirks and weird stuff apparently exists.

But you're right in the sense that if you are willing to put in maybe even as little as 2x or 3x the work it will take to do it in flash alone, you probably could do something neat that would work on all browsers except IE.

In other words, it's not ready yet.

I don't think such a hard line can be drawn between 'supporting' and 'blocking'. By allowing third-party layers, you do commit to supporting them in the sense of not breaking them, because breaking them would hurt your actual customers impression of you. This means that engineering decisions have to be made with them in mind, and resources have to be committed to testing these platforms as well. I wouldn't feel so wary about such things myself, except that my experience of software development has taught me that it is at the boundaries of systems (like between Flash's internal assumptions and the Obj-C runtime) that misunderstandings and (therefore) the trickiest bugs occur.

Seems to work well on other platforms though.

I think the question we need to ask ourselves is; do we want more flexibility in development, faster evolution of the platform or more maintainable software? We can pick maybe two of those three, and accept the third as the trade-off. I think a better argument against Apple could be made by people if they acknowledged that such a trade-off exists.

Of course they do, but when Apple screw companies over that has nothing to do with tradeoffs. Right now, Apple is ruining the business of at least two companies that invested a heavily in the iPhone OS (as in time and money). They arbitrarily change the rules and then they even refuse to tell these thirdparty toolmakes whether they are in or out.

There is no excuse for this, which means it is ignored here but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I don't like the term 'fanboy' because it is often an ad hominem attack used to provoke an emotional reaction. What I do wish is that people would acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world, with imperfect people and imperfect solutions. Everything is about trade-offs. Sometimes these trade-offs benefit you, sometimes they don't. The best way to convince someone that they've made the wrong trade-off is to acknowledge that the trade-off has happened, but that the balance was wrong for some reason. Emotive attacks just diminish one's perceived significance.

I use the term fanboys to describe the people who simply echo Steve Jobs (less eloquently) without any technical knowledge or experience to back up their opinions. They don't really care about the discussion but more about proclaiming really loudly how much they love Apple and hate everyone else. Pretty disruptive.

Needless to say, you're not in that category along with a few others but you are the vast minority.

 

[Hal Itosis]

Major fail by Apple. The web is not only about this kind of stuff.

Flash does more than video and photo libraries. Granted, Flash performance sucks a bit, especially under OS X, it's still a good platform.

True, Flash does more than video and photo libraries. Much more. But that's actually part of the problem: it does too much. Flash has its fingers firmly implanted in way too many slices of the Internet pie. Fundamental structures such as video and photo libraries are precisely the first areas where it needs to be weeded out completely. We have been too dependent on one company's technology for such basic web features for far too long. [yah, for DRM'ed content it may linger a little longer... but regular viddy? C.Ya.]

<snip>
I also do real development, have created Mac apps in C++, C, Cocoa/Obj-C, as well as development on Windows, Unix and Linux. The basic HTML/CSS/JS isn't hardcore at all (though you can make it hardcore with OOP JS and learning how to traverse and manipulate the DOM) which is why I've always been puzzled by so many "Web developers" insisting that Flash is the only way to get things done.

And frankly, every Flash "developer" I've ever met tended to over-rely on canned Flash files and pre-written code available online. I have yet to meet a Flash developer who has any significant programming skills. If someone invests that much energy into a single, proprietary development environment like that, I don't have a lot of sympathy when the inevitable times comes that it dies and leaves them in the cold. It happens. If you had real programming skills, it wouldn't matter to you. Move on to something else.
</snip>

Oh snap!

finally, Flash developers don't need to "move on" since Flash development is alive and well. to assume otherwise would be rather sheltered and apple-fanboyish.

You mean like this . . .

As a Flash Developer - And on behalf of other Flash designers and developers, I would like to thank Apple for being douche bags trying to prove a point, and in the process probably eliminating work for people at a time when work is scarce.

I'm toying with 2 new mottos.
"Apple. Don't blame us. Blame Hypercard."
or
"Apple. If we can't figure out a way to make it work, we'll blame somebody else."

 

[jimmyjoemccrow]

I don't get it, Safari as the build they provide for OS X is webkit + Safari UI. If you want the browser (ie. webkit) on linux just build the damn thing. Yes, the UI will be using QT/GTK/whatever but the damn rendering engine will be identical.

The demos Apple posted have a safari restriction on them just to make sure people see the stuff Apple intended to, and not broken pages due to other browsers not implementing the features they are using *YET*.
If you build a webkit browser on linux and spoof the useragent you will be able to see the page just fine and dandy.

I'm willing to bet you googled webkit on linux to come up with this reply. It is a long workaround to go through.

 

[HyperZboy]

I'm actually less-than-impressed with Apple's HTML5 video player. Anyone wanting to see what can really be done in HTML5, check this out:

http://jilion.com/sublime/video

It is a slick video and great example of HTML5, but that video runs jittery on a high end dual processor PowerMac G5.

So how the hell will it run slick on an iPhone or iPad or even the original round of low end INTEL Macs (which of course were slower than the high end G5 at the time)? LOL

 

[macintoshtoffy]

Not impressed at all compared to Flash. Put down the Koolaid. Try using the web app on your iPad and change from landscape to portrait or vice versa. Then tell us again how wonderfully it functions. Here's a hint, it craps the bed when you do it.

So says the adobe employee abusing Apple instead of fixing the f-cking problems with Flash. Now run along sunshine and fix the f-cking Flash or we'll send Steve Jobs mother in-law who is apparently 10 times worse than him.

 

[HyperZboy]

Anyone willing to post a video of these sites working on their iPhone? youtube is very poor for this.

Here is a comparison of Flash vs HTML5 on the Nexus One:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUWo19BcC7s

However I can't be sure if the guy is a Flash developer since his accent makes it hard to tell what he said his job was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NlYsbA4OzU

difficult to see what performance is like but the kid mentions twice that HTML5 video eats battery life (surprise surprise) and still has a lot of glitches.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0wfQBOaSKM

This one looks pretty good. Smooth scrolling and playback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRwl75CpluY

Another good one but pretty basic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCNC1tcb7LA

Bad. Glitchy and jerky when he scrolls it.

My own tests on my iBook showed that the same video in HTML5 was jerky while in Flash it was smooth. That's not an ARM processor but it is a relatively low power device (1GHz PPC) suggesting that HTML5 will not be any better than Flash on mobile devices.

All those saying that HTML 5 is in its infancy are just providing an argument against Jobs case. It's not widely implemented yet in all browsers, it seems still to be buggy and the details are not agreed upon.

Thank you for proving my case for Flash on the iPad. I think you hit on practically every point I've tried to make against Steve Jobs' argument.

It's clearly a grudge match between Steve Jobs and Adobe and the consumer is caught in the middle.

Meanwhile Jobs famed Reality Distortion Field is in high gear and the fanboys are licking up his Flash trash talk like a dog to a bowel of water.

I honestly don't care how the magician pulls the tricks, just make the damn thing work and stop pretending that the lack of Flash is a "feature."

And yet there are people here on this site that are comparing the LACK of Flash to the floppy drive. Of course there was an optical drive to replace that at the time.

HTML5 does not completely replace nor is it at this time better than Flash and that means I can't go to a lot of websites I'm used to going to.

It's just that simple, people just want it to work, they don't care how the magician does the tricks, they just wanna see them!

 

[Arnia]

Yes, you want it to degrade nicely but to what end? If we look at the demo, it runs pretty well in Safari on OSX/win. On Windows, video doesn't work before you install a plugin. On Chrome certains things do actually work and seem to be consistent with Safari but audio works on OSX and not on windows. Most of it shows something on firefox but it looks weird and doesn't really work right.

To the end that the page can be functional, if not designed in exactly the same way. I do not think that concrete consistency is necessary in most situations. Usually what is wanted is consistency of brand and consistency of function. The former requires the same brand values to be communicated no matter what user agent is used (even Lynx) and should be trivial if you are branding well (i.e. your copy communicates your brand as well as the graphics.) The second requires leveraging and understanding webarch. This is no different, for me, than a typesetter needing to understand about leading and type colour. You learn the medium to exploit it.

With regards the inconsistencies, I must confess to being confused about why they haven't put more effort into browser compatibility. Firefox (at least recent versions) supports CSS 2D Transformations and CSS Transitions. Even if they didn't, it would be possible to design the markup to degrade gracefully (in fact, usually it is doing things in the easiest way that enables this). I am not going to assume they were 'lazy' or 'incompetent', because usually there are unknown reasons for these decisions, but I would like to know what they are.

Now, someone posted this cool player that degrades to flash: http://jilion.com/sublime/video

This runs great in Safari and Chrome for Windows. In Chrome for OSX, not so much.

Works well here (Chrome is currently my primary browser on OS X) so perhaps we can figure out what's happening on your system. Now, I believe this should be easier and it behoves us to make sure this happens. However, as with all things, there is not only a technological side to this problem but a political and social side. Technology doesn't move forward smoothly and gradually, but in bursts of sudden movement caused by a change in social situations (such as usage patterns or economics). Apple seem to believe that technology is about to move again, and are publicly backing their horse. This makes it more likely that their horse will win and that people will resolve these problems. If everyone backed everything at every time, there would be no movement at all (people are naturally conservative.) Now, whether a particular change is a good thing or not is another debate entirely.

Of course, you can forget about these demos running on any flavour of IE.

Well, IE 9 is working towards support for some of them. But really, this is always going to be the case with technology. Different versions (and approaches) exist side-by-side for some time. It is usually impossible to support all versions at once, so you have to pick the ones with the greatest expected pay-off over the lifetime of your work. However, by doing things lazily (least markup and code to accomplish an effect, building to webarch, building the most important things first) you often find that you're most of the way to progressive enhancement anyway, have a more maintainable system, benefit from better indexing and archiving and are more 'future proof', so increasing the maximum lifetime of your invested energy.

So the question becomes: Why even do it in HTML5 when I'm going to do the same thing in Flash anyway at this point to get a consistent result what works for 90% of customers? I'm not saying you can't get consistent results across HTML5 supporting browsers but lots of quirks and weird stuff apparently exists.

Not as much weird stuff exists as you think. HTML 5's point is that it is documenting stuff that has already been implemented so that browsers can act in an interoperable fashion. There are quirks, but there are quirks with all technology. Good software engineering, as would be required with Flash anyway, can isolate those quirks into modules which can be reused. The video player you posted is a good example of such a general, reusable module. You don't need to re-implement everything yourself every time. You can use libraries of functionality you just drop into your pages.

But you're right in the sense that if you are willing to put in maybe even as little as 2x or 3x the work it will take to do it in flash alone, you probably could do something neat that would work on all browsers except IE.

Sources for those numbers? I've never found that it takes substantially more effort to work across Gecko, WebKit and Presto than just one of these. IE is a different matter, but for reasons entirely separate to these effects (and more to do with general development work).

In other words, it's not ready yet.

Can I ask you for a criterion for 'readiness' then? What would be needed for it to be considered ready, because I feel we have very different thresholds here. Note, I am not talking about completely replacing Flash (such all-or-nothing attitudes simply stoke passions without appreciating the realities of software engineering) but rather when should it be used at all?

Seems to work well on other platforms though.

My comment was relating to the notion of native apps written in Flash and compiled via Objective-C.

Of course they do, but when Apple screw companies over that has nothing to do with tradeoffs. Right now, Apple is ruining the business of at least two companies that invested a heavily in the iPhone OS (as in time and money). They arbitrarily change the rules and then they even refuse to tell these thirdparty toolmakes whether they are in or out.

There is no excuse for this, which means it is ignored here but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

There may be an excuse for it, and it may not be arbitrary. Just because you and I can't see one, does not mean one doesn't exist. It also doesn't mean that it does, but I'd be leery of making such absolutist statements. As I said, I would like more transparency, but I also accept that the world is a lot more complicated than just my desires. I try and understand things by looking at all the possibilities I can imagine at the same time. Of course I can only talk about them discretely, but I do try and consider them all as far as humanly possible. My career depends upon me anticipating changes in the direction of technology, and in the social environment technology lives within. Not to mention it is fun trying to puzzle things out

I use the term fanboys to describe the people who simply echo Steve Jobs (less eloquently) without any technical knowledge or experience to back up their opinions. They don't really care about the discussion but more about proclaiming really loudly how much they love Apple and hate everyone else. Pretty disruptive.

Needless to say, you're not in that category along with a few others but you are the vast minority.

I find I learn more if I presume that everyone is (mostly) reasonable until proven otherwise. I also find people tend to be calmer and more collected if I treat them rationally and provide evidence for my position without insulting them for holding theirs. Pragmatically then, for me, it is better to think of people like that even if they were utterly irrational and unreasonable in their opinions.

 

[Gepper]

I'm willing to bet you googled webkit on linux to come up with this reply. It is a long workaround to go through.

No, i've been following (very loosely though) webkit since it was forked of KDE's codebase. The point i'm trying to make that there is nothing evil about all this. At this very moment we have flash on all high performance platforms so people are in no way or shape stopped from creating websites using it.

On the mobile side however we at the moment only have one choice, html 5. This spec is in it's current state not fully usable. Gecko, webkit, opera, ie etc are not in "sync" but they will be when it's mature (give it a few more months).

So what do we do? Sit on our hands and hope that Adobe will do a good job or start working on html 5? I prefer we work on html 5 which apple apparently is pushing hard.

I think this is a good thing.

 

[Gepper]

It is a slick video and great example of HTML5, but that video runs jittery on a high end dual processor PowerMac G5.

So how the hell will it run slick on an iPhone or iPad or even the original round of low end INTEL Macs (which of course were slower than the high end G5 at the time)? LOL

The same thing don't even make a dent on the CPU graph on my macbook pro '08

 

[KnightWRX]

DHTML is not a standard, nor is it dead or weak.

DHTML is a standard, albeit, many standards rolled under a common name. Kinda like "HTML5" which is being used as an umbrella for many standards (MathML, SVG, HTML5 itself, WebGL, etc..). The difference being of course there never was a draft or standardised "DHTML" language per say.

DHTML is DOM/HTML/CSS. All of these are standardized, in different versions. The term came around the time of DOM 3.0, HTML4 and CSS 2.0. The fracturing it suffered is mostly because of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 that didn't implement specifications put forth by the w3c about 10 years ago. They had the time, yet preferred not to do it in order to retain control and try to seize the web for their own.

Luckily for us it backfired on them and they are steadily losing market share to alternative, standard based browsers that don't compete on vendor lock-in rendering engines, but on features, performance and stability.

For a time however, standard's based DHTML was weak and dying. Microsoft almost accomplished what they set forth on doing. Pheonix (Firefox's initial name) is pretty much the browser that saved the web, and the name was fitting considering it was rising from the ashes of the deceased Netscape (after AOL bought them and they became a "Web portal", they were on life support). Too bad that the Database company had to force the Mozilla foundation into changing the name.