Live data from Hacker News

Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

javaworld.com

41–50 of 93 posts

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#42
post #29

> Welcome to famo.us > a javascript engine and framework that solves HTML5 performance And doesn't work in Firefox. Aweso.me!

But the article says it's based on "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers". How can this be?

Probably using -webkit vendor prefixes (can't check for sure, on iPhone)

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#43
Having never heard of this before, I actually read this half-way through and thought it was a highly satirical piece, so I went back here before realizing it's not.

The animations were pretty smooth anyway, but my cursor would skip frames over the content.

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#44
Looks like a nice 3D tweening DOM engine. Related (and recommended) visits for people interested in that sort of thing:

- http://hakim.se/

- http://desandro.github.io/3dtransforms/

- http://glmatrix.net/

As for the article... the author confuses "rendering" with "layout":

- "the primary part we need to rewrite is the part of the renderer that creates and multiplies the matrices"

- "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d, which lets us compute the composite matrix and skip the browser's renderer"

Which leads to some absurd claims:

- "We were 14 times faster than compiled C in Chrome"

Before reality kicks back in:

- "rendering goes through DOM"

- "Obviously, this isn't exactly the reinvention of the Web"

And this is how you sell a DOM scenegraph engine to people with more money than common sense:

- "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers"

- "all text in Famo.us applications is searchable"

- "enable rapid application development"

- "smooth, high-functioning UI across all platforms"

- "one of several enabling technologies"

- "allow enterprise users to touch-interact with big data analytics"

- "spark a new breed of gamified enterprise apps"

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#45
post #12

Sounds like they came up with a novel and impressive optimisation that everyone could benefit from, but decided to keep it to themselves and charge for it. So less "reinvent the web" than "go back to the way things were before the web" really. Whether or not there's anything wrong with that is left up to the reader. :)

Seems like just another case of Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#48
post #20

Is this just a closed-source ripo^H^H^H^H fork of Three.js? The example shown on famo.us is identical to MrDoob's Three.js example that uses CSS3: http://www.mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/threejs/css3d/periodict... Edit: looks like it's the other way around -- according to MrDoob's G+ post from last year, he based his Three.js CSS3 example directly on the design created by famo.us: https://plus.google.com/113862800338869…

The first thing I did when I saw Famo.us last year was rip into the code. With a little persistence, you can pretty easily use the code without waiting for their release.

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#49
My prototyping framework http://framerjs.com uses the exact same approach, divs positioned with only css matrix transforms. Great for high performance animations.

I've sometimes thought about building a full fledged ui framework on top of it but it doesn't work (exactly the same) in all browsers. And I suspect offloading everything to the gpu by default will lead to other sorts of performance issues but I'll have to test this.

Framer also includes spring physics and is fully integrated with Photoshop. You should check it out if you build prototypes.

Re: Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

#50
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the article says it's based on "a W3C standard that must be supported by all browsers". How can this be?

Probably using -webkit vendor prefixes (can't check for sure, on iPhone)

Article says "We use the CSS3 primitive -webkit-transform: matrix3d", so that'd be a yes
Post reply on HN