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Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

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Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#131

Post by Touche »

kenferry wrote: post #75
Touche wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They released IndexedDB several years after everyone else (I believe at least 3 years) and major bugs. They have shown no interest in Web Components. They have shown no interest in WebRTC. They have shown no interest in Service Workers. They have very little ES6 support. Let's not focus on the one example given in the article, this is a pattern.

Have you seen the WebRTC code? It's 1.1 million lines of gnarly C++. It's cool in terms of features, but that's the essence of bloat. One of the reasons Safari was built off of khtml in the first place was manageable code size.

Is there just 1 WebRTC implementation? Do Google and Mozilla not have their own separate codebases?

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#132

Post by bad_user »

frik wrote: post #128
dragonwriter wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. No, the idea that WebSQLDB was not tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. See Section 5 of the last version of the WebSQLDB spec [0]: User agents must implement the SQL dialect supported by Sqlite 3.6.19. > SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard SQLite version 3.6.19 does not support all of, or only, the SQL92 standard.…

Everyone knows the "Web SQL Database W3C recommendation" document should be re-evaluated, better formulated and improved. Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, stated that the dialect won't change (removing syntax) in SQLite v3 during the WebSQL W3C standardization in the mailing list. About 95% of all mobile devices already support WebSQL (iOS & Android & WindowsPhone (via official Microsoft sponsored extension)). An…

> About 95% of all mobile devices already support WebSQL

Yes, they are embedding SQLite. That's not a standard, it's a hack.

> The only missing browsers are IE 11 and Firefox/FirefoxOS

Which is why I'm glad they are still relevant.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#133

Post by shmerl »

richtr wrote: post #55

What is difficult to argue against, and I'm surprised isn't mentioned in this article, is that Apple have completely eliminated market competition from happening around web standards on the iOS platform. It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple to support that position without appreciating the ramifications of not allowing market forces to dr…

Why can't Apple be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit for that? MS was targeted for something very similar.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#134

Post by shmerl »

eridius wrote: post #102
air wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ "Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

Huh. I haven't actually read through that document in a while. I thought it just had the prohibition against scripting languages other than the iOS JavaScriptCore (i.e. WebKit Javascript). I wonder why it now states that you must use the WebKit framework as well?

> I thought it just had the prohibition against scripting languages other than the iOS JavaScriptCore (i.e. WebKit Javascript).

Which is already close to prohibiting other browsers (like Firefox for instance).

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#135

Post by bad_user »

frik wrote: post #126
thristian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Nobody ever said WebSQL was intended to require a specific version of SQLite. But nearly every browser would have used SQLite, and experience has shown that when you expo…

* There is a common misconception about SQLite3 dynamic type system. It can be done using SQL statements: http://stackoverflow.com/a/2762020 , http://www.sqlite.org/datatype3.html . The browser vendors could enable static typing by default by adding a few lines of code or just a flag afaik. Beside that there are other SQL db engines. SQL-92 was the third revision of the SQL database query language. It's the common di…

Or you know, one could use IndexedDB, because you don't need a freaking relational model, unless you're planning to execute ad-hoc queries and aggregation on a significant amount of data, data that would do well to fit the relational model, which would be a stupid idea to do in the browser.

> everyone else would use SQLite anyway

That does not make it a web standard and after 25 years of web evolution, I can't believe we are still having the same problems. The web has been extremely successful for some obvious reasons, yet we keep forgetting those reasons. One of the web's primary traits is that it's based on documented standards and has multiple implementations. SQLite fails that test.

> One could use a shim

Or you could not have this problem in the first place. And technically you could implement WebSQL on top of IndexedDB.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#136

Post by james-skemp »

CSMastermind wrote: post #14
mootothemax wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really? ... It's a Microsoft-backed spec that only Microsoft supports. Exactly, you've hit the nail on the head. It seems a bit strange to single out Apple when there are plenty of other vendors also not implementing it. That said , I know very little about the history of mobile browser development; have Apple historically dragged their feet on mobile Safari?

Apple is singled out because they're the driver behind all of this. Touch Events was born from Apple's initial work to touch-enable Safari on the iPhone. W3C moved to standardize it but Apple declined to be involved in the effort. Then they blocked the WC3 from releasing it as a standard using their patents, which they were unwilling to offer a royalty free grant for users of the spec. Pointer Events was first propos…

Thank you for the very detailed history of this.

Amazing how some things have changed in just the last decade between the browser makers.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#137

Post by hyperpape »

shmerl wrote: post #133
richtr wrote: post #55

What is difficult to argue against, and I'm surprised isn't mentioned in this article, is that Apple have completely eliminated market competition from happening around web standards on the iOS platform. It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple to support that position without appreciating the ramifications of not allowing market forces to dr…

Why can't Apple be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit for that? MS was targeted for something very similar.

Apple has a minority market share.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#138

Post by fauigerzigerk »

kolbe wrote: post #64

This article's title got me thinking that Apple, as a company, could actually be interested in suppressing the advancement of the web. Their apps are a shockingly effective alternative to the internet, and the store becomes more comprehensive by the year. Even at this point, Apple's apps can replace all but some long-tail usages. So, despite the fact that suppressing the progress of the web will hurt the user experie…

That's not going to happen for multiple reasons.

First of all, iOS market share in 2014 was 15%. You can actually stop reading here if you like.

Second, we only use tens of apps, but most of us use hundereds if not thousands of websites per year, because most provide content, not applications. Installing an app for each of them does not scale.

And third, apps are currently uncrawlable and hence there is no way to search for server side content inside and across them. It's not unimaginable for the App Store to solve this one eventually.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#139

Post by shmerl »

hyperpape wrote: post #137
shmerl wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't Apple be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit for that? MS was targeted for something very similar.

Apple has a minority market share.

Not if they can control Web standards this way. It means they have way too much influence.

Re: Is Apple stifling progress in Web standards?

#140

Post by cududa »

shmerl wrote: post #139
hyperpape wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has a minority market share.

Not if they can control Web standards this way. It means they have way too much influence.

That's not how the Sherman Anti-Trust act defines monopolies, and that's the law they'd have to be prosecuted under. A republican congress probably isn't going to pass laws designed to sanction the most valuable country in the world.
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