Color me jaded, but the "excitement" about HTML5 is hardly ever about doing new things, it's about doing the same old things, but with different tools.
Almost every HTML5 demo I've seen just reproduces something we could already to with technologies that ran on the desktop years ago. We're supposed to be excited that we can now implement - barely, and extremely laboriously, and with a clunky, buggy, incompatibility-ridden toolkit - the same kinds of things desktop apps programmers have been doing for a long time.
As a web developer pushing 40, I dread seeing our profession head towards making desktop-style apps in the browser, and along way spending the next 10 years repeating the mistakes and relearning the lessons of current desktop app developers. I'm not sure I've got enough time left to stomach that.
However, I disagree that we should ignore the desktop UI in the browser. It's generally better than web UIs and there is no reason that we have to repeat the mistakes desktop UIs have made the in past.
But one question from a JS/CSS noob: there seems to be a rash of people doing a lot of things in pure CSS. Is this more for fun and as an experiment, or is there an actual technological reason to do it strictly through CSS? Is pure CSS the way things are heading, or is using javascript the real way to do things?
A few people who are (overly, in my opinion) concerned about their privacy and security don't have Javascript enabled in their browser, so stuff that requires it wont work.
Thats the only real reason I can see for trying to do as much in CSS3 as possible other than just for the challenge.
Turning Javascript off (or at least manually whitelisting via NoScript) also can give a quite big performance boost, by simply turning off many useless effects.
Making CPU-hungry CSS3 kind of defeats that purpose, of course.
CSS animations and graphic jobs can be hardware accelerated, so it's way faster and doesn't affect the performance of the browser. There was an article posted here on HN about this exact topic, comparing animations in JavaScript vs CSS. I'm sorry I can't find it :(
It is certainly valuable to do stuff in CSS instead of Javascript to a certain degree. Especially the small gimmicks that add a little visual touch but isn't part of your core functionality. E.g. some CSS3 transition animations. Doing stuff in JavaScript is slower and more error prone.
The recent trend of trying to do everything in only CSS3 without Javascript is mostly a challenge for the developer and some of that stuff serves no actual value. For example, many people have been doing some icons with CSS3, by creating a bazillion elements in the DOM tree and adding CSS3 styles. That serves no practical purpose whatsoever, since the HTML+CSS required probably takes more space than the image it's replacing and is very slow to process and render for the browser.
CSS can be used to do practical icons and buttons, though. Instead of trying to create a pixel perfect replica of a bitmap, you can do pretty nice icons by using a nice unicode symbol (or text), and put some rounded corners, a neat gradient and a drop shadow.
If only people would stop using absolute pixel sizes in their CSS stylesheets, we could get pretty nice scalable (as in screen size) Web UI's.
A few very slick transitions - it's a little irritating that the font sizes, window borders, drop shadows, hover states on close/minimize buttons, etc are all slightly wrong though.
Same problem here. It showed up again after Command + Tabbing out of Chrome and switching back in. It's humorous that the custom cursor fails in the one case where it's identical to my default cursor.
Can anyone explain to me why I see a yellow or red checkered pattern when my computer or browser is struggling to render a page? I tried to take a screenshot, but this usually happens super fast and I can't react in time.
I'm on a MacBook Pro and running Chrome (although I get the checkered yellow pattern in other applications like iTunes as well).
Well this is pretty neat. Reminds me of the old PSP portals that people used to make for homebrew back in the day. They'd emulate Windows and Ubuntu and everything in between.
I would just open this up full-screen on someone's laptop and watch the magic unfurl. A little more JS and you could have an awesome copy of Lion in the browser.
You need to click on the arrow icon or the logo. It's buggy as hell. Click Help then all the windowing system is gone south. I found major bugs after playing with it for 2 minutes. Why hasnn't the author spent at least that amount of time to test it before putting it in the wild? It's mostly javascript btw. So the title of the article is wrong.
No surprises: it works in Safari, the irony being that its Safari on a hackintosh zooming along just fine on a scuzzy little netbook -- which is even cooler. Or not, depending on how you view these things.
Almost every HTML5 demo I've seen just reproduces something we could already to with technologies that ran on the desktop years ago. We're supposed to be excited that we can now implement - barely, and extremely laboriously, and with a clunky, buggy, incompatibility-ridden toolkit - the same kinds of things desktop apps programmers have been doing for a long time.
As a web developer pushing 40, I dread seeing our profession head towards making desktop-style apps in the browser, and along way spending the next 10 years repeating the mistakes and relearning the lessons of current desktop app developers. I'm not sure I've got enough time left to stomach that.