Submitted by “WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS. CSS Animations is one of the enhancements to CSS proposed by the WebKit project that we’ve been calling CSS Effects (eg. gradients, masks, transitions). The goal is to provide properties that allow Web developers to create graphically rich content. In many cases animations are presentational, and therefore belong in the styling system. This allows developers to write declarative rules for animations, replacing lots of hard-to-maintain animation code in JavaScript.”
Now all we need is some support added to the “Ajax” libraries like jQuery, that will add this functionality to MS’s IE 8. Since we all know they would never do anything to IE that would make it compete with Silverlight, and .NET.
It’s a shame that Webkit implements so much functionality that I’m never going to be able to use. The same is true of Opera and Firefox, of course, although to a lesser extent at this stage.
Just off the top of my head – CSS animations, better text controls (custom fonts, shadows, outlines, stroke control, probably more), transformations (reflection, rotation, and so on), masks, multiple background images, the ability to use SVG everywhere you’d normally use an image, SVG animation, native video and audio support, gradients, rounded corners, multiple-column layouts, outlines around elements, CSS table layouts, client-side storage, the canvas element, XML, XSLT, XPath, a bucket load of JavaScript features… Oh, and it’s fast enough to make all kinds of new things possible that were previously too slow.
And it’s not just Microsoft that are preventing these features from ever being useful. They’re obviously only progressing fast enough to stop web developers from treating IE as a second-class browser. They’d rather developers jump ship to Silverlight, obviously.
The other problem is embedded web browsers. Aside from being non-upgradeable, these things typically have the same feature set as IE 6. Basically, CSS1, a subset of CSS2, and a really poor JavaScript implementation. Even the best ones (like Opera) become out of date very quickly.
Realistically, Microsoft won’t catch up until IE 10 or so (about four years, given their current development pace). We’ll still be limited by the install base of old IE browsers (you can bet that lots of people will still be using IE 7), and by the possibly larger install base of non-upgradeable embedded browsers, which we’re stuck with until the devices they run on wear out. Considering that they still sell four year old phones, with five or six year old browsers, that’s going to take a decade or more.
All those features, and no way to make use of them. It’s almost enough to make you give up, and switch to Flash. At least it’s consistent, even if it’s only available and useful on desktop web browsers.
I refuse to switch to IE8, WMP12 because Microsoft has spent so long ignoring these products that just bringing them up to snuff with the rest is not enough. With the money and resources available to Microsoft the fact that VLC, MPlayer, and others offer so many more features and support so many codecs OOB it’s pathetic
I just wish they weren’t included in Windows 7.
Hmm. Epiphany runs on Windows, Konqueror runs on Windows and with Qt4.5 you’ll have those WebKit changes for Konqueror, not to mention that Epiphany will default to WebKit.
That means you’ve got Windows, Linux and OS X enabled WebKit browsers to use.
If you don’t want to deal with Safari [I assume you don’t want it on Windows seeing as you mention IE] on Windows, just push GTK and Qt to have feature parity.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think he was worried about using Safari or other browsers under Windows.
I think his problem with not being able to use these features is that IE7/8 doesn’t currently support them, so writing a web app that supports these CSS features will only work on 30% of browsers out there…
I kind of like the idea of an IE7/8 user hitting a website and facing a message saying that their browser is not fully supported, and they will risk limited functionality unless they upgrade to a supported browser. It would renew my faith in karma.
Same here. I find it funny that for years end users have been told that they must download IE for the ‘full internet experience’ – maybe there should be a reaction, “must have webkit powered browser for the full experience” – then have a whole heap of browsers with the ‘powered by Webkit’ logo on their website
I’ve had a look at GNOME 2.26 roadmap btw and apparently there is a move to replace gtkhtml with webkit – I’d love GNOME to get rid of Firefox and replace it with a Webkit powered epiphany instead. Lord knows the web has been held back for so long due to Internet Explorer and its refusal to support the latest standards.
Edited 2009-02-10 07:39 UTC
Bingo.
You can’t really require that visitors to a website switch to a different browser to use your web page. Not only might some of them not want to, some of them might not be able to.
That means that all these cool features are completely unavailable for use on websites.
Giving IE users a degraded (but still functional) experience is tempting. There’s just no way to do it unless you want lose 70% of your audience.
Using HTML bits inside applications is something else altogether. In that case, either embedding a Webkit-based browser (easy if you’re using Qt, or running on Mac OS X), or even Gecko is a good solution.
It also might be a good solution for intranet applications, if you’re able to control the browser used, or provide something like Prism to launch the site as a desktop application.
Yes there is. You just do it silently. You don’t bring up a page saying “You should upgrade your browser”. You just give IE users the best experience you can and do the same for Webkit users. People may discover for themselves the sexy new features they could be experiencing if they upgraded their browser.
If you go to a website and are told your browser isn’t good enough, you may go elsewhere. If you discover another browser gives you extra features on a website you already use, you won’t stop using the site, you’ll start using the other browser.
If I can reduce “rich graphical effects” by running IE, I guess I should install Wine and start running it.
What we really need is something that makes ajax (worthwhile functionality) easy, but extraneous visual diarrhea hard. “Skip intro”, please.
If it were just about pointless graphical effects, that’s what Flash is for.