Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos

theflashblog.com

11–13 of 13 posts

Re: Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a graduate philosophy seminar as a senior and we spent a full lecture debating the semantics and pragmatics of fuzzy quantifiers like this. There was a sizable portion of the class that felt that "few" is a relative term (as in "few people believe in aliens"), but that "a few" is an absolute term (as in "I cooked a few eggs"). You may be a "grammar fanboy", but I don't think your proposed semantics of "a few"…

Oh, I agree that my own perspectives on "a few" aren't necessarily correct. And "grammar fanboy" was just self-deprecation, not an indication of expertise; everybody uses grammar, so everybody is as much an 'expert' in how it should and shouldn't be used as anybody else. What I was commenting on was the apparent accretions of personal "rules" surrounding the use of the phrase "a few" colloquially. Sure, when I say "I…

I think most people have the intuition that 2 is a couple, a few is strictly greater than a couple, and several is weakly greater than a few.

In any case, in this context, I think it's safe to say that "a few lines of Javascript" implies something on the order of 3-10, rather than 700; I do think Apple was being misleading. Just because the upper bound on something (like the size of a JS library) is high doesn't mean that the phrase "a few" can mean 700...it certainly doesn't scale linearly. At least, that's my intuition, but I'd be pretty surprised if I'm an outlier here.

Re: Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos

#12
post #10
post #5

Interesting to note that Mobile safari score 134 better then desktop version which scores 122 for latest version of safari.

And, if the rumors are true (the rumors are never true), we'll get Safari 5 on Monday. I'd like to see the browser score then.

Probably the same as the current WebKit nightly build (144).

Re: Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos

#13
post #4
post #3

I grudgingly concede that there might be some genuine kind of inter-browser standardization politics around Apple coding demos labelled "HTML5" using CSS, markup, and backend quirks specific to their (mostly open source) browser. But is there any honest argument at all that these demos, regardless of how letter-of-the-law standards compliant they actually are, are not categorically more open, standardized, and web-ce…

They are. And they don’t even need the demos to tell us that (they admittedly could have handled the demos better, I just don’t think it’s a big deal). Safari is a great browser, Webkit is a kick ass render engine, you can do cool stuff with it on the iPhone and iPad and all that cool stuff will (nearly always) also work on any other (say, Android) modern mobile OS. Or nearly every modern browser. Moreover, if you do…

I can fully understand why Apple promotes Safari. The demos are a showcase of bleeding edge CSS, namely 3D transitions, currently implemented only by Safari. No doubt other browsers will implement them too. See http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-3d-transforms/

Also, being hardware accelerated on OS X, Safari renders 2D/3D transitions at superior framerate compared to Chrome (don't even mention Firefox). The difference is huge. Apple's message is "Hey look, we made a great (open source) rendering engine and want show you what can be done in HTML/CSS when things are properly implemented. Check this out as a reference implementation and feel free to implement it in your browser."

[Yes, the 2D/3D HW accelerated rendering uses Apple's proprietary frameworks and is not open sourced, AFAIK.]

Post reply on HN