"This demo was designed with the latest web standards supported by Safari. If you’d like to experience this demo, simply download Safari. It’s free for Mac and PC, and it only takes a few minutes."
Hum, because they're showing the latest HTML features that Safari supports? Not all browsers support the same range of features for a particular HTML standard.
Any organization which denies access to its HTML5 pages to browsers that support them is not fully behind the spirit of HTML. The reason is clear and understandable — marketing their browser — but so are the implications.
Multiple companies, including Apple (and Nokia, which ain't exactly a minor player in the mobile market) objected to HTML5 mandating support for a particular codec, largely on the grounds that we don't really know the patent situations of any of the allegedly-unencumbered codecs.
Meanwhile, multiple people objected on the grounds that mandating a current (or, really, several-years-old now since that's what it is) codec in a spec that's not expected to go final for at least a few more years, and which has an expected useful life of around a decade, is just frankly stupid. It'd be like having a spec used today mandate XBM as the standard image format because that was the least-proprietary thing available 15 years ago when early browsers were being written.
Multiple companies, including Apple (and Nokia, which ain't exactly a minor player in the mobile market) objected to HTML5 mandating support for a particular codec, largely on the grounds that we don't really know the patent situations of any of the allegedly-unencumbered codecs.
Now it's my turn to call bullshit. "We don't really know the patent situations of $x" could be used as an argument against ANY piece of software or standard $x. Unless there is real evidence for such concerns, it's FUD.
There ain't no such thing as a free codec. At least, not as long as software patents exist.
Does Google want a Free, interoperable web? Then they should take the money they'd spend re-encoding all of YouTube into VP8 and instead spend it on lobbying to eliminate software patents. Then they could just use whatever's the best option from a technical perspective and we could stop having codec shitstorms every six months.
This is what groups like the MPEG-LA want us to think, but I'm not so sure. The Ogg Vorbis codec used for WebM audio has been in use for a decade, and has shipped in dozens of software and hardware products, some from large companies with big pockets. MPEG-LA made the same vague threats about patent pools against Vorbis, but they never followed through.
Xiph.org conducted a patent search early in the Vorbis process, and believes Vorbis does not infringe on any patents. Google has done their homework on VP8 as well. If they did it right, then VP8 is no more vulnerable to unknown patent threats than any random piece of software. (Sadly, any random piece of software is somewhat vulnerable.)
For that matter, there's no guarantee that H.264 is invulnerable from patent trolls who aren't members of the licensing pool. MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify licensees against third-party patents.
Sadly, any random piece of software is somewhat vulnerable.
Any random piece of software is vulnerable.
Look, if Google's serious about the threat software patents pose to openness, there's an obvious thing they should be doing, and it isn't "switch the video codec we use in our web browser". Until I see them doing some serious (i.e., big-money) lobbying to abolish software patents, I'm going to assume the whole openness thing is just marketing bullshit designed to play into geeks' stereotypes of them and Apple.
Not that I disagree, but a "patent search" early in the process for Vorbis is not that comforting. Vorbis has been around for a while now and new patents are awarded that all the time that are used against prior art. Unless Google/On2 has an inside man at the patent office raising Vorbis as prior art, it's likely that someone could craft a patent specifically intended to target Vorbis, get it approved, and then sue lots of people. Trolls take this approach fairly often.
Apple believes
that it is essential to continued interoperability and development of
the Web that fundamental W3C standards be available on a royalty-free
basis. In line with the W3C's mission to "lead the Web to its full
potential," Apple supports a W3C patent policy with an immutable
commitment to royalty-free licensing for fundamental Web standards.
Apple offers this statement in support of its position.
It's powerful and persuasive stuff, worth reading in full. They only removed this statement from their website about 6 months ago.
Their implementations of the HTML5 <video> and <audio> draft standards work only with royalty-encumbered codecs. (The licensing is currently royalty-free for publishers and end users, but not for device manufacturers or browser vendors.)
Google were also opposed to a format in the spec, they claimed ogg theora was too large in file size. Why do you think they bought On2 and released WebM in the first place? There already was a free video code theora before.
MS didn't commmit to anything, Mozilla essentially blocked H.264 from becoming specified codec too. All had reasonably sound reasons to hold their respective position. Not everything can be explained as good vs. evil.
That's not inconsistent with being "fully behind HTML5". That page is meant to show off how Safari handles various HTML5 features. If you view it in a different browser, it is not showing you how Safari handles those features. Hence, it makes perfect sense for it to try to limit itself to people using Safari.
That page is meant to show off how Safari handles various HTML5 features.
Isn't the point of HTML that all browsers handle it similarly? If that link is restricted to one browser, it isn't better than all the "Designed for IE6" sites you used to see in the early '00s, and absolutely no evidence of Apple being "fully behind HTML5".
HTML5 is not a standard. It does not yet behave the same in all browsers that implement it. Different browsers implement different subsets of it.
The site you cite is meant specifically to show how Apple is doing with their HTML5 implementation. There is simply no point in viewing it in another browser. Viewing it in, say, Firefox would tell you nothing at all about how well Apple has implemented HTML5 in Safari.
This is completely different from the "Designed for IE6" sites. Those sites were generally presenting information that was useful to people regardless of which browser they were using.
Correct, which is probably why Apple says: "The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript".
It's not exactly insightful but it does have some merit. Apple's approach is an odd mix of open and closed. You could describe it as 'strategically open'... (of course - this applies to Google too to a slightly lesser degree).
No company supports open-source if it directly conflicts with their perceived interests. Some companies just take a wider view than others.
