MacDailyNews Take: Jeroen and Zachary need to look up the word “hype” before they team up to misuse it again. It’s not an exaggeration when “every week, major tech companies announce improved support or new breakthroughs.”
Wijering and Ozer continue, “In this debate, no company is as vocal as Apple. The company’s latest move is the release of an HTML5 showcase that includes a video demo featuring the capabilities of web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. This effort, while exciting, is misleading and potentially detrimental to the landscape of web development and browser compatibilities. The demo is definitely inspiring and helps to move HTML5 Video along at a fast clip. At the same time though, none of the cool gizmos on this page are actually web standards. Instead, they are specific functionalities found in Apple’s Safari/Quicktime product stack (which is why access is restricted to Safari).”
“It would be awesome for Apple to start advocating the use of cross-browser HTML5 Video, being honest about what the technology can and cannot do today,” Wijering and Ozer. “Alternatively, it would be great for Apple to tell developers what its demo actually is: an excellent showcase of the video capabilities of its Safari / Quicktime product stack. Regardless, Apple should stop labelling vendor-specific implementations as web standards. It confuses web developers and it will lead to a new era of browser incompatibility that will slow down the overall adoption of HTML5 – and the conveniences it brings to web developers around the world.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We agree that Apple should advocate the use of cross-browser HTML5 Video. We believe the reason they limited their HTML5 Showcase to Safari was to ensure that the demos would work as intended. Other browsers have varying states of HTML5 compatibility.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “ChrissyOne” for the heads up.]