Mozilla evangelist: Apple HTML5 demos harm the open Web

Apple recently launched an HTML5 showcase on its official website with several demos that are intended to highlight some of the advanced Web development capabilities that are made available by emerging standards. The showcase has attracted criticism from standards advocates, however, because it pops up a message telling users that they will need to download Safari in order to view the demos.

Some of the demos legitimately require Safari because they use Apple-specific Web features that are still at extremely early stages of the standardization process, but most of the demos will function properly in Chrome and Firefox. Apple's clumsy browser detection mechanism and careless attitude about the distinction between Safari features and actual standards has raised some troubling questions for the Web community.

It's worth noting from the start that the underlying idea of Apple's HTML5 showcase is not itself controversial. In fact, the Mozilla Hacks blog and Google's Chrome Experiments gallery both serve similar purposes. All three sites have some demos and content that rely to an extent on nascent technologies that are not yet supported across multiple browsers. It's also important to understand that browser-specific features are a necessary and important part of the Web's evolution—most new features that become standards are originally implemented in some experimental form by one of the major browser vendors.

The problem is that Apple's showcase lacks sufficient disclosure and clarity regarding the level of cross-browser support and industry acceptance for individual features.

Some of the language on the showcase page is misleading, and the message that it displays to non-Safari users is detrimental to the long-term goals of the HTML5 standards effort. Telling users that they need one specific browser in order to view HTML5 content downplays the availability of HTML5 support in other modern browsers and wrongly inflates the perception that HTML5 is fragmented. It's also troubling because it sets a bad example for third-party Web developers regarding best practices for browser detection.

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Oddly enough, Apple has a whole separate version of the showcase on its developer website that exhibits none of these offensive characteristics. The more appropriately named "Safari Technology Demos" page has the same demos, but doesn't categorically block alternate browsers. I was able to test the demos in Chrome and found that most of them worked as expected. This alternate page is accessible by clicking the "Developers" link at the bottom of the HTML5 showcase. This alternate version of the showcase is much closer to how it should be done.

I don't think that anybody objects to Apple having a Safari Technology Demos page that shows off a mix of emerging Web standards and Safari features. But it's not appropriate to conflate browser-specific functionality and open standards in the manner that the HTML5 showcase page does.

Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard voiced his concern about the issue in a recent blog entry. He characterizes Apple's HTML5 showcase as a misguided marketing stunt and explains why it is detrimental to the browser ecosystem. He says that the browser block on the demos is a "F**k You" to the people who make and run other standards-compliant browsers. He also voices some criticism of Google, which he says has made similar mistakes in promoting its Native Client technology and other nonstandard features.

"Apple's messaging is clearly meant to say 'hey, we love the web' but the actual demos they have and the fact that actively block other browsers from those demos don't match their messaging. It's not intellectually honest at all," Blizzard wrote. "HTML5 is in a dangerous place since everyone wants to own it, but everyone is in a different place in terms of support or even what it means. I can’t promise what other organizations will do, but I can at least say what I will do in the future. At Mozilla, intellectual honesty matters and it matters to me personally. So I don’t think you’ll see us do things like this in the future."

Indeed, Mozilla has a reasonably good track record when it comes to accurately conveying the standardization status of Web technologies. This is particularly evident in the Mozilla Hacks blog, where posts consistently include appropriate disclosure in cases where nonstandard or Mozilla-specific technologies are discussed.

The real power of HTML5 is that it is vendor-neutral technology that anyone can implement and support with their own authoring tools. Apple should change its HTML5 showcase page to reflect the true spirit of the standard: interoperability and cross-browser support.