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Arcade Fire Demo, HTML5 and “One Markup”

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I tried the “Arcade Fire” demo earlier today which you can grab up here;

image

and I had the same experience as the guys at TechCrunch in that I first tried to view the site in IE9 and the site told me that it was “designed with Google Chrome in mind”.

I then tried the site in Chrome and it’s an interesting experiment and does quite a bit of popping open new windows from the browser and sync’ing that with things going on in other windows. Cool stuff.

I don’t quite take TechCrunch’s view about “browser wars” but I do take their opinion that, as the IE people have been saying, you have to be able to run the same markup on multiple browsers/platforms. I’ve visited quite a lot of “HTML5” sites with IE9 that tell me I’m using an [old/wrong/non-HTML5] browser and this seems to be another example.

I like this “same markup” story – I think the IE folks are right to bang on that particular drum hard.

Now, naturally, I’d have started to build this kind of demo with Silverlight in the first place and then the “same markup” idea becomes a moot point as those cross-platform differences are already abstracted for you by the runtime but then I’d have to admit that I’m a bit biased Winking smile


Posted Mon, Sep 6 2010 11:42 PM by mtaulty
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Comments

P. Jacobsen wrote re: Arcade Fire Demo, HTML5 and “One Markup”
on Tue, Sep 7 2010 2:53 PM

This Arcade Fire demo required all my hefty desktop PC could muster, and even then, performed poorly.

We changed horses midstream from HTML/Java to Silverlight, and are soon to release a rather robust enterprise project management application. We switched to Silverlight, because it enabled us to develop instantaneous cross-project resource leveling (realistic scheduling). With HTML/Java such scheduling was horribly slow - quite useless really, even with small data set test scenarios.

Simple as that. Silverlight solved a performance problem that likely wouldn't have been solved with HTML5, even if we had waited for ten years (see below).

From Wikipedia: "Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012. The criteria for the specification becoming a W3C Recommendation is “two 100% complete and fully interoperable implementations”.  In an interview with TechRepublic, Hickson guessed that this would occur in the year 2022 or later.  However, many parts of the specification are stable and may be implemented in products (sooner)".

FlashPerspective wrote re: Arcade Fire Demo, HTML5 and “One Markup”
on Thu, Sep 9 2010 10:39 PM

Ummm... there was this program about 10 years ago called Flash by this little company called Macromedia (now owned by Adobe, unfortunately). This flash program could do everything HTML 5 and Silverlight do today plus some...

Oh, I just checked, flash is still around, and 90% (or more) of the computers on the internet have it installed!!

What was that about HTML 5 & Silverlight??

mtaulty wrote re: Arcade Fire Demo, HTML5 and “One Markup”
on Thu, Sep 9 2010 11:20 PM

FlashPerspective,

Not entirely sure of the point you're making here.

Flash, Silverlight and HTML5 differ in their capabilities. They also differ in terms of being standarised/proprietary and they also differ in terms of their developer model and tooling story. They also differ in terms of their current status and in terms of how widely available they are.

So...?

Mike.