"The upstream work is not sufficient for what we will need. It is only the beginning of the work. We would need to offload compositing to the GPU."
Sounds like Apple decided to enable the existing WebKit implementation while Google is working on their own implementation. (which could very well end up back into WebKit proper at some point) This is exactly how standards in the context of friendly competition are supposed to work. You can't really expect everyone working off WebKit code to coordinate when certain features or standards support are turned on in beta or public releases.
The difference is between adopting open standards that others haven't gotten around to yet
versus inventing your own undocumented functionality for the purpose of making compatibility impossible.
Apple is further down the track. MS was trying to derail the train.
Making you download Safari does seem a strange choice. But then, the whole point of the page is "look how well these things work in Safari", so why not?
In reality, all of the CSS transforms and effects (and plenty of other Safari features) were created by Apple without input from any of the other browser vendors or standards bodies. Some of those things have been picked up, some haven't. I actually think this is the right way to do things, and I don't want to give off the impression that I don't appreciate what the Safari team has spent the last few years doing, but I'm also not wild about letting Apple distort the picture for the sake of scoring PR points against flash (which is what this website is all about).
Standards should work everywhere IMO
By this definition we hardly have any standards. Say hello to IE6.I am a member of WHATWG mailing list so I can see how standards are born, and this level of misunderstanding about web standards in general and HTML5 in particular really saddens me.
Which, given other browser-makers' commitment to supporting the emerging specs, just goes to show that 'standards' is a misnomer in this case. In informal usage that's OK; most of us hope that the standardisation of CSS3, HTML5 and related WHATWG initiatives will happen sooner rather than later. But misapplying the term in your marketing material (linked from the front page) is confusing and unhelpful.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ 'W3C Working Draft 4 March 2010'
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ 'W3C Recommendation 24 December 1999'
So by 'recommendation', am I to assume you're talking about HTML 4.01?
(edit: again with the downvotes, no answer...)
To be more accurate Apple should have said that it is committed in implementing HTML5 standard, not that it has done it, because at the moment HTML5 is not ready.
From Wikipedia: "Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later. However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products"
From here http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ:
For a spec to become a REC today, it requires two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations, which is proven by each successfully passing literally thousands of test cases (20,000 tests for the whole spec would probably be a conservative estimate)
The candidate recommendation phase, which WHATWG expects to happen next year is a much more relevant date. That aside I do wonder if this level of effort isn't just wasted pedantry.
He was saying that it is useful well before it is an official recommendation. He is a member of the WHAT-WG and Apple was one of the founding members so what he's saying is pretty much in lock-step with apple and the webkit team.
But my point was that giving impression that one company already has it all ready is stretching the truth as HTML5 is still a moving target.
I ran Chromium with my user agent set to Safari. And here's where it gets interesting.
The demos that don't work in Chromium, notably the ones that require CSS 3D transforms, get removed from the listings on the pages that have them. So for example, the "Transitions" page, only the Dissolve, Toss, Slide In, Iris and Fade Through effects show up. Unsurprisingly, those are the least technically impressive. The gallery demo in Chromium runs at a fraction of Safari's frame rate. Very choppy.
The VR demo gives you an overlay explaining that it's only supported by the iPhone browser, Safari, or another browser with 3D CSS transforms.
So I guess their demos actually detect if your browser meets the spec or not, and remove the stuff that doesn't work. I'm guessing this was the original plan -- let everyone in to show off the HTML5 tech. But then someone looked at the nerfed versions without 3D and compositing and said "that's pretty weak, we don't want that to be people's impression" or something.