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Isn't this an indication that they are doing exactly that?

Or could it be that you did not bother to read the write-up?

EDIT: grammar.

Edited 2009-09-17 18:50 UTC

Maybe this endorsement of HTML 5 from Microsoft does mean exactly that Microsoft are intending to comply with web satndards.

Mind you, in order to get even close to the level of compliance with existing five-or-more-years-old standards, Microsoft have a lot of work to do.

HTML 5 depends, for example, on some elements of DOM 3. DOM 2 is the required level for compliance with acid 3, which current Microsoft browsers fail miserably. Microsoft does however implement DOM 1, which is required for compliance with acid 2. So Microsoft is only about eight years behind the current state of play there.

HTML 5 also depends on some elements of CSS 3. Microsoft is only up to CSS 2.1 in its current codebase.

In order to be useful at all to display rich media content, in additon to HTML 5, websites might reasonably employ SVG, animated PNG, SMIL and also rely on a fast (JIT compiled) and compliant implementation of ECMAScript.

Microsoft browsers have none of that.

So, if this endorsement by Microsoft of the HTML 5 standard does in fact signal an intent on Microsoft's part to become compliant to web standards, then Microsoft have a LOT of work to do.

Edited 2009-09-18 00:04 UTC

I get sick of people talking about web standards as if they are laws that some council of governments voted on. There are some organizations that suggest new features and the browsers can adopt them if they choose. It's funny too how many people think that if IE didn't exist you would only have to test in a single browser. In reality web standards are general guidelines that leave plenty of room for browser specific quirks. I've actually ran into quirks between Windows and OSX versions of Firefox even though they had the same version number. Here's an example of one: http://www.dojotoolkit.org/forum/dojox-dojox/dojox-support/dojox-gf... Currently the best method for browser compatibility is to bypass the browser rendering engine with a plug-in like flash or silverlight. "

I get sick of people trying to pretend that one-company-supplier plugins such as flash or silverlight are in any way an acceptable idea.

If you tolerate that, then you will get that one company being in a position to decide what products can, and which cannot, access rich content on the web.

Totally, totally unacceptable.

As for standards compatibility ... there are compliance tests. Get back to me when IE can get anywhere close to compliance against those tests, and then we can see if a "write once view on any browser" approach is practical or not.

I do not like most uses of Flash, and I find most arguments for Flash to be actually for video playing capabilities (i.e. most of Flash on the iPhone arguments). But credit were it is due: Flash is accessible and easy to approach by designers and creators. JavaScript is not.

I do not like most uses of Flash, and I find most arguments for Flash to be actually for video playing capabilities (i.e. most of Flash on the iPhone arguments). But credit were it is due: Flash is accessible and easy to approach by designers and creators. JavaScript is not. "

I don't care if it is the bees knees ... since it comes from just one company, it is totally unacceptable.

"If you tolerate that, then you will get that one company being in a position to decide what products can, and which cannot, access rich content on the web.

Totally, totally unacceptable."

There is no way that people should let Adobe get to a position where Adobe deciding if they will support flash on a particular product is a make-or-break decision for that product.

The makers of the product are then beholden to Adobe. Adobe can start demanding huge sums from OEMs if the OEM wants flash capability on their product. OEMs being required to pay out huge sums (to anyone, it doesn't matter who to) will increase the price of products.

Everyone loses (except Adobe).

Totally, totally unaccpetable.

I don't care if it is the bees knees ... since it comes from just one company, it is totally unacceptable. "

Unacceptable, so the action to be taken is…?

My argument was not so much of favoring Flash over JavaScript, but to bring in the issue that whereas Adobe has created a wonderful development environment, the rest of the industry has failed in going from file format to accessible tools to create those. Creating SVG, Canvas, DHTML, etc for non-programmers is basically out of the question.

Since the first argument is "unacceptable" I would assume people would demand having decent development tools accessible to artists or where artists and programmers can easily integrate to, of which there are none to the level of Flash.

Flash took off because everyone could create content with it. If the same is not for those preferable formats, they are not going to take off.

Edited 2009-09-18 08:03 UTC

I am on the other hand sick of the whole current world wide web.

Flash, Silverligh, <video>-tags -- different format, shame sh*t.

I am sick of the "rich content".

I am sick of the world wide web that looks like some friggin' casino in Las Vegas. YouTube, the greatest technological advancement of mankind.

Fully functional www-page should not require anything beyond basic HTML and CSS from the client-side.

Well, at least with flash you are partially correct. Silverlight however is quite a different kind of beast. As it is not available for Linux, it's platform independence is by far worse than flash, and when it comes to the BSD or other UNIXoid systems, you are entirely out of luck even with flash.

Neither thing is perfect as we can see, but having a freely implementable standard is by far preferable over having a closed-source, single company controlled plug-in.

Testing and enabling websites in different browsers/platforms is still a necessity, as is debuggung java code on every platform it is supposed to run on. That is part of the work of a web designer.

Easy to understand: its for the money... HTML5 will be running on nearly everything, from cellphone, desktop, to server. You do not need then a Windows OS, nor WPF or Silverlight.

By the way using Silverlight on Bing.com is a good chess move. You have suddenly as much silverlight user as bing user (and soon as windows users). This give to Silverlight a critical mass to draw developer attention.

I wish google would use SVG and Theora on its search page...

It's all about your files, and soon where you save them (in cloud vs your disk)

Hyperbole. Web apps are very prominent, but they aren't exactly pushing aside traditional apps like MS Office to the degree that you're suggesting.



Good points.



I have a feeling that Google is going to start feeling some heat from Bing 2.0, and they will adapt.

Microsoft are making Office:Web 2010.

How is that an exaggeration? More and more desktop applications are being moved into the cloud and no matter if we think that is good or bad, MS will be doing the same, to whatever extent, in order to remain any kind of player on the scene.

By the way, hyperbole is the wrong term. I've seen you use it far too often to point out exaggerations. You might want to look up the actual meaning of the term.

While there are still a lot of large, rich client applications out there, and being developed, most of the small applications that fill niches and vertical markets that would once have been written as rich client applications in something like VB started being developed as web applications years ago. It's far easier to develop and ultimately to support.

Microsoft has lost those developers, probably forever, and assuming that people would rewrite everything in .Net and that the web world will fall back into the arms of Microsoft APIs isn't helping.


ROTFL.

Edited 2009-09-17 23:31 UTC

Hyperbole. Web apps are very prominent, but they aren't exactly pushing aside traditional apps like MS Office to the degree that you're suggesting.

By the way using Silverlight on Bing.com is a good chess move. You have suddenly as much silverlight user as bing user (and soon as windows users). This give to Silverlight a critical mass to draw developer attention.

Good points.

I wish google would use SVG and Theora on its search page... It's all about your files, and soon where you save them (in cloud vs your disk)

I have a feeling that Google is going to start feeling some heat from Bing 2.0, and they will adapt. "

What your missing is that mobile Safari on iPhone has show that proprietary mobile pages are dead n gone. The killer feature was mobile safari's ability to "smart zoom" standards compliant pages and "massage" the UI to meet the needs of a mobile user.. on the fly with no actual page markup changes. Apple's "iphone web app SDK" already implements some of the easy HTML5 changes that don't break most standards compliant browsers too badly now. Best yet, all this is for "free", no proprietary page extensions or custom browsers, no flash or silverlight.. just clean tools everybody has been ranting about being underused for nearly a decade.

All those "extra" tags give mobile and handicap accessible browsers the info they need to pick out content from navigation quickly and easily without expensive, cpu intensive "AI" needed. HTML5 is the spring cleaning needed for 5-6 years on the web design front.

They've got no chance. This isn't the 1990s any more where PC usage was expanding at a huge rate and you could get yourself an installed base overnight by not really doing anything. You can't just create something completely new now and expect people to use it without paying attention to what most of the market is using and the legacy of existing web applications and technology. There is a reason why Google's home page looks the way it does.

There's also one reason, and one reason only, why people use a particular search engine - results. If a search engine can't deliver that then users don't care what rich client plugin they want you to download when you visit their home page. Concentrating on throwing Silverlight in there is yet another in a long line of sad attempts to get the tide to go back and get the rest of the world using yet another set of Microsoft web APIs.

You would have a point if Flash was functionally equivalent to Sliverlight, which it isn't.

The other big part of Silverlight is that builds upon the existing .net base. It's very appealing to current .net programmers who want to build a web app but don't want to learn an entirely new platform. Youtube may never adopt it but plenty of corporations will that want to move existing applications to the web.

Nobody cares how much better Silverlight is, or might be. The point is that Flash is already there, it's being used in massive amounts and no one is ditching it all for something else any time soon. You can't just expect an installed base to drop what it's doing because you say you have something wonderful. It doesn't work like that. It's not as if you can take your existing Flash and HTML/Javascript code and convert it to Silverlight.

People just don't re-write stuff, and Microsoft still doesn't get that.


You might have a point if there seemed to be a lot of people wanting to develop a .Net web application. When you look at the probable total of web applications out there, there aren't. Microsoft are trying to appeal to one installed base that isn't really there.


They already have, and they're not doing it with Silverlight, or even Flash, and probably never will. Microsoft also lost a lot of VB and COM developers when the whole .Net thing happened, and that's when many of the applications that could moved to being web based.

I risk repeating myself here.

HTML5 isn't a standard yet. It's still in draft form.

As it is in Draft, it is the ideal time for Microsoft to apply the second 'E'.
They have just done the Embrace.
Now we wait for the Extend phase.

They're suggesting an extend.

Very sensible suggestion it is too.

In this one I applaud the behaviour of the Microsoft employee who brings in the change suggestions BEFORE the standard is fixed.

I am just waiting for some Microsoft strategist to start putting an end to such fine behaviour of a single Microsoft employee. It would not surprise me if it happened.

Wireless-n only just got ratified. How long have people been using draft-n devices?

There are HTML5 implementations out there and people are writing HTML5 sites right now. Waiting for the draft to pass before writing a line of HTML5 is stupid, at best.

Trying to code to a moving draft is also pretty stupid, too. It depends on where you want to spend your time.

HTML5 doesn't specify a codec to use with the video tag. So safari is in full compliance even if it supports h.264 only.

Safari does fully support the HTML5 video tag.

Out of the box, it will not play Ogg Theora video files and nor does it need to. That is not part of the HTML5 standard.

To be a bit more specific, the codecs that a video file/stream has been encoded using (audio and video tracks) is not part of the HTML5 standard. Instead the standard provides a mechanism for indicating multiple different source files, each of which should have it's codecs identified. The browser can then pick and choose from the available sources one that it can render.

The various parties making browsers cannot agree on a common codec and it is not likely they ever will because they have varying needs. Apple, for example, aren't keen on Theora for two essentially two reasons. Firstly they are concerned that it could be vulnerable to a submarine patent attack, since it has yet to be proved that it does not infringe on any third party patents. Secondly there are no chips available to do Theora decoding - the iPhone does it's h.264 decoding using dedicated hardware which uses a load less battery power than software decoding of Theora would. Nokia have very similar concerns.

Even if hardware becomes available that does Theora decoding that's still no good to Apple and Nokia. They both have millions of phones already out there that have h.264 decoding on board, and (in Apple's case at least) already supporting the html5 video tag.

Since Safari's support for audio and video is built on top of Quicktime, it will support any audio or video format that Quicktime does. So if you've got the Ogg Quicktime Components plugin installed then you'll be able to play Ogg Theora encoded videos, and Ogg Vorbis encoded audio.

Users aren't going to faff about with installing codecs and developers aren't going to go for something where users have to go back to that, or where they cannot be sure of what is at the client end on any platform.

That's how we have ended up going from specific video/audio formats like Real on the web to Flash simply becoming a de facto standard. I don't see it changing.

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

Also, the MPEG-LA H.264 change in licencing in 2011 will see to the success of OGG. Do you think blogs are going to publihs H.264 when you’ve got the ‘performance’-police on the prowl?

That's unfortunate. If the codec isn't standardised, then I don't see much practical advantage to using the video tag instead of using Flash for video delivery.



There's also a third reason: Apple has a vested interest in promoting h.264, as they've essentially hitched their wagon to it (the preferred format the iPod/iPhone, the default output codec for Apple's video production software, etc).

Edited 2009-09-18 14:31 UTC

HTML5 makes it easier for the user, less easier for the publisher.

With HTML5, you don’t need to install Flash.

With HTML5, the video doesn’t kill your Quad Core machine

With HTML5, you can save the video, easily

With HTML5, you don’t have to *care* what format the video is; that’s the publisher’s problem

With HTML5, you can extend the video with JS. Adding motion detection, captioning, time-based tagging and commenting &c.

In short, HTML5 video is better in every way for viewers. It’s only publishers that have the pain of having to encode twice.

Installing Flash is not a big deal for most users.



Flash doesn't kill my machine.



Good for viewers, will not be popular with publishers unless there's a way to prevent it.



Say what? So with HTML5 my OS will magically play any and all video and audio formats?

Edited 2009-09-18 10:14 UTC

Except for those on iPhone / Mobile devices, some Linux variants, smaller OSes like Haiku &c.



Number one reason for browser crashes, in the world.



Because it’s impossible to download Flash videos already?



In Safari, yes. If you have the codecs installed. Microsoft may do a similar thing with IE. If you don’t have Flash installed (see point.1) then the codecs already on your computer are no good.

Lucky for you.

On my Macbook, playing a Flash video pegs one CPU core at 100%. Not just videos - normal Flash animations do that too, although slightly less so. Doesn't matter if it's on a visible page or not - even a Flash animation in a background tab does it. When browsing, particularly without adblock or equivalent, I can easily end up with both CPU cores pegged at 100% CPU usage.

Not only does this slow the system to a crawl (including making Flash videos stutter), it also drains the battery much faster, and causes the machine to heat up.

That aside, it doesn't even work properly. The most reliable implementation of Flash video I've ever seen is Youtube. Even that sometimes gets stuck for no reason, refuses to load videos, gets confused about how much video has been buffered, and suffers from hitching. Forget watching HD videos. Forget watching videos in full-screen. No hardware acceleration, no possibility of hardware accelerated scaling...

Not only that, but I tend to have a browser crash every couple of days. I've examined the backtraces a few times - the culprit is always Flash. I've had exactly one instance of Firefox crashing without the Flash plugin being at fault.

The Linux version of Flash is in a far worse state. Same basic problems (crashy, slow, uses far too much CPU time), but it's even slower. How about all those platforms where Flash isn't even available? Phones, for example (and no, neither Flash 7 nor Flash Lite count).

The Windows version of Flash at least doesn't crash as much, and doesn't use 100% CPU for watching a postage-stamp sized video. At high resolutions, full-screen video is still unusable. It's still unreliable.

The Quicktime plugin on a Mac has none of these problems, even when playing WMV files. Neither do the Windows Media Player or Quicktime plugins on Windows. Neither do native HTML5 video in Safari, Firefox or Opera, on any platform.

It's kind of dumb that the multitude of browser plugins Flash video was supposed to replace actually work far better than Flash does. Hell, even Silverlight does a better job than Flash does, with the same video codec.