A few weeks back Apple said that Flash will never make an appearance on their iPhone/iPad/Touch devices for varying reasons. (Here)
(They said stuff like, it drains the battery, it's outdated, it's crap, etc)

They also said that Flash wouldn't been needed soon because HTML5 was awesome and could do pretty much everything.

Yesterday Apple put up a HTML5 showcase page,

I headed over to that page to see how video looked in HTML5 and see if there was any info on how to do it myself.
(I don't mind uploading to YouTube but I still think the quality is lacking.)

I (and many many others... but not Gav) were greeted with this:


This "showcase" of "being open" hasn't gone down well with the tech-savvy people.
It's all a bit weird, Apple are saying "open technology is best" but only if you use their products to view it.

DY357LX said:

It's all a bit weird, Apple are saying "open technology is best" but only if you use their products to view it.

In a nutshell - this describes the problem that I have with what I refer to as the "Cult of Jobs". Apple in the last few years have been behaving far worse than Microsoft at the peak of their attempts to lock people into their platform.

That isn't to say that Apple might not be right. Reading some of the Microsoft development blogs it's clear that a large proportion of the problems that they face in developing the Windows OS are down to the (now legally mandated) requirement to keep the platform open and to keep legacy products available - including those ones that never conformed to Microsoft development guidelines in the first place.

Apple may have sidestepped this issue - but the irony is that Microsoft have been hamstrung by firms like Apple who now can develop a more solid platform precisely because they don't have to obey the rules they managed to get the more famous "M$" to obey.

To be fair, a lot of that stuff probably will only turn out properly in Safari and/or Chrome, but you guys are right that Apple really do enjoy the 'open' product lockdown a lot these days. The video/audio demos, for example, demand you also have Quicktime installed.

Also check out this clever little site in a Webkit browser and then compare it to IE8!

DY357LX said:

I (and many many others... but not Gav) were greeted with this:

I was greeted with that. I use Opera, not Safari. Been getting your facts off "The Register..?"

Quote:

I was greeted with that. I use Opera, not Safari. Been getting your facts off "The Register..?"

Oh right, I thought you said the other night that you used Safari. My half-arsed apologies then

I guess no-one can view the demo's then! Woo!

I'm still not giving an apology for occasionally browsing The Register though, seeing as you still haven't given us a valid reason to-as why you despise it so.
("It's crap" isn't valid.... not yet anyway.)

@Chez http://caniuse.com/ has a chart thingy that shows what can and can't displayed in each browser. It's appearing we're all losing out at the moment and need 2/3 browsers to see/do everything.
(If you absolutely must that is. I really don't care about "PNG alpha transparency" just yet.)

By the time HTML5 etc is considered "the standard"; pretty much every browser will (probably) have been updated to support it.