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Comment by snprbob86 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see these fancy "HTML5" multimedia demos, I get a little sad that others are impressed by the fact that they were made with web technologies. I know that, practically speaking, we're stuck with the current web tech for a while, but they are, quite frankly, shit for the types of tasks that we demand from them. After decades of studying & practicing computer animation in film and games, we're barely scratching the surface on the web.

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> After decades of studying & practicing computer animation in film

That is distributed through video. There are closs-platform ways of distributing video. I feel that does the job pretty good, and certainly better than "shit".

If I go to the cinema and watch a Pixar movie, I'm quite content that they pre-rendered the thing very expensively at Pixar and I'm watching something that is limited in resolution, but much cheaper to distribute and reproduce: I feel it's OK that the web manages to reproduce that same experience pretty well.

Film is the high bar: The very best we can do with virtually infinite time and resources.

You're totally ignoring the fact that we've got near film-quality, interactive 3D animations, running at 30 to 30 frames per second on 10 year old hardware collecting dust in people's living rooms.

Meanwhile, this simple animation isn't quite getting the minimum 24 frames per second when run full screened on my 30 inch monitor powered by a brand new MacBook Pro.

Considering that it runs very smooth for me at 1080p using a first generation, low-end quad core and ultra cheap onboard video, I can only assume that you either have a technical issue with your system or you're using a browser that doesn't properly support some of the required CSS3 features.

It's not enough to say that it runs smoothly for most of the animation. It should run smoothly for virtually every second of the animation. I have a computer that beats yours hardware-wise running Chrome, and there were many places in the animation where fps dropped below an acceptable threshold. Some people are also more trained to notice fps drops too.

Running "very smooth for you" doesn't mean much. For one, it doesn't do much anyway -- some circles, some boxes, some bordes, shape tweening, and a soundtrack. You could do this stuff in 1080p in 10 year old hardware if you did it native. Heck, you could probably even do it in an Amiga 3000 circa 1992. I sure remember an O2 (I think it was called) by SGI doing far more impressive real time stuff in 1996. And that machine had about 1/5 the capabilities of my iPhone.

The thing is, it uses quite a lot CPU power for what it does (and no, it's not "technical issues" with individual systems: it tends to do so in general in every system), and the animation isn't always smooth and far from 60fps.

And the suggestion that he's "using a browser that doesn't properly support some of the required CSS3 features" only reinforces his point, that when it comes to web technology it's a large step backwards from what we can achieve in native systems.

Well, in its defense, you can do things like this quite efficiently with WebGL or SVG. This is more of an abuse than a demonstration of the fastest-possible rendering in browsers. Similarly, my machine can't render a video into an ASCII stream into my resized-to-1-px-per-character terminal at full framerate; whether it can or cannot doesn't say anything about the state of playing videos on a computer.

If anything, demos like this serve more to demonstrate the capabilities of the system to people who may not be aware such things are even possible, not the best practices. This wasn't possible a few years ago in this way, period - now it is. Isn't that interesting and/or useful to know?

Think about what one is able to do w/ TV graphics packages like this: http://www.chyron.com/

Jiggling the handle to get these things to work seems like it will be around for quite a while

Web animations can be used for other purposes than just storytelling. They can be part of the interface, an app or an interactive tutorial.

That's not true. WebGL can get you to pretty much any level of animation you would need, it's just much harder to code for than CSS.

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