Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts On Apple’s HTML5 Demos

theflashblog.com

14 pointsbep12 comments

Sorry, this is apropos of nothing, but...

<grammar fanboy>In this article Lee quotes the Light Table demo as saying that it was accomplished with "with just a few lines of CSS and JavaScript," and then remarks that "I was curious as to the contents of those 3 lines as they must be the most powerful 3 lines of code ever written. In actual fact, the JavaScript file that drives the demo is 700 lines long."

What in god's name makes people assume that "a few" means "three?" "A few" just means exactly what it says: a relatively small number. Two is actually a relatively small number in certain circumstances, so you could say "a few" to mean "two." In this circumstance, 700 lines of code could be said to be "a few" lines, because I've seen full Javascript apps that use 7000 lines.

I don't really care about the trivial Flash/HTML5 contentiousness, and I'd rather stay out of it. But I keep encountering these weird misapprehensions based on imaginary rules concerning the phrase "a few," and it seems silly to me. </grammar fanboy>

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" are necessarily correct.

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 cooked a few eggs," there's a context; people know I wouldn't cook 7000 eggs, so they would never assume that's what I meant. But I have in fact been chided by people pedantically when I've said something like "I cooked a few eggs," meaning two; in this case, people have often said to me that what I really mean is that I cooked a couple eggs, as "a few" is apparently distinct from "a couple."

All I'm saying is: there aren't necessarily little rules governing when people can and can't use the phrase "a few." I object whenever I'm told that I really shouldn't use "a few" to mean "a relatively small amount;" why not? Maybe Apple's mention of "a few lines of CSS and Javascript" in the article really does imply only and exactly three, but I can't see how. It's possible that there are agreed-upon linguistic usages that mean that Apple is actually lying, but it seems to me much more likely that "a few" is just a phrase that's more fluid and less strict than Lee is taking it to be. Chiding people for using "a few" to mean "relatively few" rather than "always and only three" seems silly to me.

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.

Although I don't think "a few" is an exact quantity, I don't agree with the definition of "relatively small" either. If I take 7000 line and compare it to 70,000 lines, 7K becomes relatively small and I could then call it "a few" lines.

Think about how people use the term. "I'm having a few people over for a bbq." Or "I ate a few cookies." Would you ever expect to see 700 people at the bbq or that the person ate 700 cookies? I think if you were to ask people "how many is 'a few'?" The answer would likely be a number greater than 1 and less than 10. Or maybe a range within 1 and 10.

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-centric than Flash?

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 don’t like the Safari UI you can check out one of several Webkit browsers (most notably Chrome).

If you could do everything with emerging web standards that you can now do with Flash this wouldn’t even be a contest. The emerging standards would win hands down. You admittedly can’t (yet?) but it really does look as though the scenarios where you need to use Flash are getting scarcer by the day.

Apple might be the bad guys with respect to the App Store, they are the good guys as far as browser development is concerned.

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.]

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).

I just see this as another instance of Apple falling behind the curve. It used to be that they were so far ahead of everyone else (in design, products, etc.) that they didn't worry about everyone else. Now they are suing people for copying their things, postering about how good they are, etc.

This new state of affairs saddens me somewhat as I have always liked and respected Apple and they are now giving me cause to doubt them.

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