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Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

runs smooth for me on Safari OS X.

And I really like it... but....

It's style over substance and reminds me of the bad old days when Flash polluted every website with something snazzy but superfluous.

I don't really know how to phrase what I'm thinking. It's good to try new things, especially with stuff like CSS3 and WebGL on the horizon. But it's bad to just shoot things down. While I don't think for a second that you're promoting 3d transforms as something that everyone should be using for everything... some people out there really will latch onto it as a "cool thing" and abuse it. Which isn't your fault, it's just the way the world works.

So in summary. Awesome, love it! But I hope CSS3 doesn't become the new Flash.

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I think we'll see a year or two of abuse going forward as this starts eating Flash, and people become overcome with experimentation. This seems the adaption pattern with most technology. I know I'll spend a good amount of time abusing this just to familiarize myself with the new opportunities. Things seem to balance back to a more modest (and as we say in Sweden, "lagom") state after a while.

In a way, it mimicks what Tim O'Reilly wrote on piracy earlier today: "History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law."

> "But I hope CSS3 doesn't become the new Flash."

The beauty about HTML/CSS over Flash is that we can fix bad design.

Think about things like Readability that can transform horrifying websites into clean, readable articles. This is what happens when you give the entire stack to everyone, instead of hiding things behind a proprietary runtime (that crashes... and crashes... and gets hacked... and then crashes).

I'm convinced that we will always be unfortunately afflicted with some poorly-considered design/engineering fad or another. Before Flash websites, we had Java applet reflections, animated GIFs, fluorescent green on black... the list goes on. But thankfully, with HTML/CSS the client can choose to mitigate this a great deal.

I think the question is: Is it content that I still want to access in a few years?

For example, Facebook with its terrible URLs and JavaScript everywhere is very fragile. Hard to cache, hard to archive, but who cares? If the whole site went bankrupt in ten years, would many people actually export their data? Or a blog on Rails, where every article becomes obsolete after a year. Or a restaurant website. Those sites can use all the magic they want.

But if you write about mathematics or art or other things that should pass the test of time, please make it bare-bones, semantic HTML. If I really like it, I can just archive it and show it to my children later. It's like using hover for menus, who'd guessed that this would break for millions of devices one day?

> For example, Facebook with its terrible URLs and JavaScript everywhere is very fragile. Hard to cache, hard to archive, but who cares? If the whole site went bankrupt in ten years, would many people actually export their data?

If I had been coming up with examples of sites where people would want to export their data in such an event, Facebook would have been number 2 or 3 on my list, after an email or a document site (eg. Gmail or Google Docs).

This site is barebones semantic HTML. Turn off styling and JS and you’re left with something eminently readable or consumable.

Thanks for pointing it out. I didn't want to question this particular site. That this is possible is indeed a big step forward from Flash.

So... did it load fast? Was the content readable, selectable and natively scrollable? Did I break any of your regular habits, like 'back' or 'open in new tab' or copy/pasting links? Did you get a good sense of the site's contents and purpose from your first visit? Does everything remain accessible if you turn off JavaScript?

It's like everyone assumes nobody but them knows how to make websites.

My apologies - this site is indeed a masterpiece. The usability is much better than most HTML websites, no need to mention Flash.

But in the sense in which HTML5 is going to replace Flash, I am pessimistic that many websites will go to the same lengths. And where there is more code, there are more possibilities to break in the future.

To be nitpicky about usability of newfangled stuff: Using web fonts disables the built-in dictionary on OS X, both in Safari and in Chrome. (I am so happy that this is one thing Facebook has not yet embraced.)

I don't disagree, but I think this is a void easily fixed with the right libraries and frameworks. Remember the web before jQuery? You couldn't get most developers to touch JS with a ten foot pole...

I think I'm thinking the same thing, it's hard to put into words. I think we absolutely need people to show us the possibilities and overuse this. I hope css3 does become flash! I hope it gets stretched to its limit and overused by coders like the author here. Once that happens there will be a backlash and we'll be using it sensibly again. I think the web goes through these phases where some technologies get overused and it's how we find the best practices and proper ways to implement this sort of thing when the situation calls for it.

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