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September 11, 2011 3:53 AM

The expressive web What it says on the tin. HTML5 CSS3 and the modern browser.
posted by the noob (39 comments total)

This nice demonstration of web technology is largely soured by the ridiculous "achievement" layer that was added. Wow! I've "achieved" so much by clicking a nav bar and some buttons.
posted by jeremias at 4:27 AM on September 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

Exactly what does it "say on the tin?" I don't see anything much expressed on that link.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:34 AM on September 11, 2011

In the future every page will be a Flash animation!
posted by alasdair at 4:36 AM on September 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

very instructive. thanks
posted by joost de vries at 4:45 AM on September 11, 2011

So the iPhone doesn't have a modern browser?
posted by blue_beetle at 5:20 AM on September 11, 2011

I love that we're reaching a point where web standards can actually be used to replace something like Flash as interactivity goes but the performance is pathetic. Even on my i5-430, 4gb, ati radeon HD5470 lap top this is very slow and all they are doing is basic animations. This is so typical of software development. With each new generation we're promised more capable and agile development tools but as the same time each generation has these ridiculous drops in performance that renders all the hardware obsolete.

Now if you excuse me I got to restart the browser because the damn demo did a number on the fan :/
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:35 AM on September 11, 2011

Foci: on my Chromium browser, with a system that wasn't top of the line even 4 years ago, with a very basic video card, it was really fast and smooth. I liked the site - really well done.
posted by rainy at 5:53 AM on September 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

I tried to punch the tree in the Transitions link to get wood.
posted by Splunge at 5:54 AM on September 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

it doesn't render correctly on a 1024x600 netbook screen, the white bar at the bottom partially covers over the popup dialogue box... (and blitzes the cpu)
posted by ennui.bz at 6:02 AM on September 11, 2011

I found it was pretty smooth in Chrome, but fairly chunky in Firefox. No show in IE8 of course, and I'm yet to be bothered downloading 9 (6+3)
posted by the noob at 6:19 AM on September 11, 2011

used to replace something like Flash […] This is so typical of software development.

This is so typical of users. They rail against something that's not only perfectly good, it's in fact better than anything else out there, and has been for, like, fifteen years because it's cool to be against Flash or because Steve Jobs told them so or some other asinine reason. So they wait around for the power of the unwashed masses to rally and build something else that isn't, I don't know… corporate or something? And you see the result: a big 'ol pile of suck-ass.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:30 AM on September 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

I don't know if it's Firefox Nightly, or Xmonad, but the browser resize wasn't detected, so no burger for me :(
posted by mikelieman at 6:32 AM on September 11, 2011

Worked fine in Chrome, but the Adobe logo sent chills down my spine and made enjoyment difficult.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:43 AM on September 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

jeremias: They needed something to demonstrate HTML5 client-side data storage. The "achievement" mechanic is how they chose to do that, since achievements are tracked in your browser, instead of on the server. I agree that it's mildly silly, but so is the rest of the site.

Ah, I didn't catch that. My snark is hereby rescinded. Mostly.
posted by jeremias at 7:03 AM on September 11, 2011

So is there an HTML5Block plugin for Firefox yet? The best feature of Flash is that it's so easy to block, this new stuff looks like it's going to be a lot more insidious.
posted by octothorpe at 7:21 AM on September 11, 2011

Oh holy crap. I watched the little blocks build for about 2 minutes, with intermittent spinning beach balls. Finally the menu appears, so I clicked web fonts, that's something I want to hear about. And now the goddam blocks are slowly disappearing, it looks like another minute or two to see the actual feature demo. I am sure that Rage Inducement is not a feature of HTML 5, but rather of Adobe.

This is a classic example of an old Comp Sci axiom, "No matter how fast engineers can make the hardware, programmers will waste it all in software."
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:22 AM on September 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

For those of you experiencing issues, perhaps there's something else at root? I'm running on a Mac Pro over 5 years old and the animations were absolutely flawless from the moment the page started loading.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 7:30 AM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

If you're looking for a little less flashy (heh) introduction to the features of HTML5, check out http://www.html5rocks.com (from Google) and http://diveintohtml5.org/ (Mark Pilgrim).
posted by sriracha at 7:31 AM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

So is there an HTML5Block plugin for Firefox yet? The best feature of Flash is that it's so easy to block, this new stuff looks like it's going to be a lot more insidious.

The NoScript plugin has got you covered.
posted by moonbiter at 7:51 AM on September 11, 2011

God, how dreadful. Some designer spent days making all those little cubes fly around like that. Some marketing person wrote all that copy. Some gamification asshole added an empty set of achievements. And nowhere did a real HTML5 advocate construct demos that, you know, show off how HTML5 is interesting.

I mean: "web fonts" lets you choose between three ugly fonts and scale them. Um, how about showcasing a real Web Font innovator like TypeKit? And "web storage" makes it sound like it's just more cookies (for storing asshole gamification data). Why not showcase something really useful like Google Docs' offline mode? They also left SVG out entirely.

The docs towards the bottom as you scroll down are nicely done, I'll give them that. The whole site is apparently an advertisement for Adobe. Which is sort of funny, really, and goes a long way to explain why it's all CPU-intensive fluff with no purpose. I try not to hate on things on Metafilter too much, but I care about HTML5. This demo is like the worst kind of showcasing; silly flash and no value.
posted by Nelson at 8:10 AM on September 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

The trouble with tools that make it easy to do horrible things on the web is that it enables a class of developer who wnts to substitute whizzyness for content. The web fills up with nearly undebuggable, badly-performing crud, and it's pretty much all negative value for users of the web. Developers who do worthwhile (and performant) things with these features generally do a lot more handcrafting and can't make use of these kinds of tools because of the unoptimized bloat they produce.
posted by George_Spiggott at 8:23 AM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Adobe is completely out of touch, good thing they don't have any real competitors.
posted by Mick at 8:30 AM on September 11, 2011

Web designers,

Please stop making HTML5 demo sites. They are worse than out of work "designers" making "minimalist movie posters." Go and make real things.

Thanks,
A Valued Internet User
posted by Threeway Handshake at 8:37 AM on September 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Worked fine on iPad 2..all those folks with performance problems - get a better browser?
posted by schwa at 8:39 AM on September 11, 2011

Also, It did not run on my MSN WebTV.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 8:42 AM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Under the HTML 5 Canvas tab you know that you can play the game right? And Firefox 6.0.2 runs it all as smooth as silk. For me at least.
posted by Splunge at 8:49 AM on September 11, 2011

My "Nightly" did the resize burger just fine. Though I'd really have been impressed if it asked me if I'd like fries with that.
posted by Obscure Reference at 9:00 AM on September 11, 2011

I thought the post title read 'The Excessive Web' and I went into it thinking "holy crap this is cool, who are the luddites on Metafilter bemoaning the future of internet tech?" Then I looked at it again, at all of its cutesy marketing ploys and achievement unlocks, as if suggesting to me that the coders think that trying out their gimmicks is a matter focused entirely on attention span and not a judgement of timeworthiness and I get to thinking maybe, maybe it is a little excessive and a lot of this UI front-end stuff just ends up obscuring the ethics and philosophies that went into a website's creation and instead puts a pretty face on something that was once easy to predict by its overuse of Flash and poorly optimized load speeds.
posted by dubusadus at 9:00 AM on September 11, 2011

The NoScript plugin has got you covered.

I'm hoping for a less drastic solution. I don't see a way to use NoScript block just the features of HTML5 that I might find annoying in certain contexts, like the animation stuff.

As an aside, the NoScript folks lost any chance at credibility in my eyes when I saw the "Download Driver Whiz to Update Your Drivers" ad running at the top of their site.
posted by sriracha at 9:15 AM on September 11, 2011

God, how dreadful. Some designer spent days making all those little cubes fly around like that. Some marketing person wrote all that copy. Some gamification asshole added an empty set of achievements.

I complain more about marketing than the average person I think, and although this wasn't really all that hot (except maybe the Breakout game -- level 4), this was a rather innocuous example of it. It's intended to demonstrate HTML5 features to an average user and drive adoption, not demonstrate to implement all these features. The fact that Adobe is behind the site, though, is worrisome.
posted by JHarris at 10:24 AM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

As an aside, the NoScript folks lost any chance at credibility in my eyes when I saw the "Download Driver Whiz to Update Your Drivers" ad running at the top of their site.

Adblock+
posted by mikelieman at 12:19 PM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

The framerate on my web-enabled fridge was terrible. HTML5 sux0rs.
posted by tempythethird at 12:50 PM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

I love that we're reaching a point where web standards can actually be used to replace something like Flash as interactivity

Apparently at least for a while we're also going to be so excited about this that we're going make the same mistakes people did with Flash: making *everything* -- including things that should be documents -- into overwrought gussied-up multimedia presentations.
posted by weston at 12:50 PM on September 11, 2011

Nice demo; the fact it runs well on Iceweasel 6 on an ikd dual-core AMD64 suggests some folks need a decent browser, or a nickel to buy a better computer.

Or looking at the names associated with the complaints and where else I see them on MeFi technology threads, to stop waiting for Steve or Gruber to tell them what to think.
posted by rodgerd at 1:08 PM on September 11, 2011

The trouble with tools that make it easy to do horrible things on the web is that it enables a class of developer who wnts to substitute whizzyness for content.

That's not really the developers' fault most of the time; it's what the restaurant owners who hired them are demanding...
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 6:10 PM on September 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

i read that as "the EXCESSIVE web"
posted by liza at 8:11 PM on September 11, 2011

As long as HTML5 destroys Flash, I am going to be as patient as the patient requires. Please take your time, Flash destroyers! Please let me know what I can do to help you!
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 8:59 PM on September 11, 2011

Can't understand why it claimed it would work in Firefox 3.5+ yet Firefox 6 wouldn't show half the animations. Safari worked fine. Weird.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:23 PM on September 11, 2011

Odd. The sliders wouldn't work for me. (Safari 5.1)

Neither would the burger, but I may just be missing something there.

They rail against something that's not only perfectly good, it's in fact better than anything else out there...

It may be the latter, but it was never the former.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:57 AM on September 12, 2011