Apple has launched a new section of its Website dedicated to showcasing the capabilities of the next generation of Web standards that fall under the HTML5 umbrella. The demos illustrates video and audio playback, typography, image manipulation, “VR” panoramas, and 360º-view presentations.
Accompanied by Steve Jobs thoughts on Flash has to be read as an argument for the decision to drop Flash on mobile devices, calming unhappy owners of iPads, iPods an iPhones. However the emphasis on “open, reliable, highly secure, and efficient” web standards leaves a bit of a bad taste when trying to access the web site from other browsers than Safari:
Most likely a javascript is used to detect the browser. On a slightly different URL the same demos reside without the Safari limitation, and a quick test indicated that most of it worked in Firefox apart from video (h.264 issue?) and 3D stuff.
Some (browser) independent HMTL5 tests and demos can be found here:
Generally the demos indicate HTML5 to be a promising format, vastly improving support for multimedia in browsers. A decade or so after the heydays of net.art, browsers are more capable than ever as a media for artistic content production and dissemination.
The Pragmatic Bookshelf currently have a book in beta (access in pdf format as it is being written) on HTML5 and CSS3 that seems quite interesting.
