Topic: What do you think of the CANVAS tag and other Safari extensions?

It looks like Safari has added some extensions to HTML to deal with the new Dashboard capabilites:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_07.html#005896

I was wondering what folks here thought about that... the Canvas tag sounds very interesting.

--- RPG Fan ---

It is a slippery slope isn't it?

I appreciate Hyatt's position. I read the Eric Meyer link too, and I appreciate HIS position!

The only good thing about this debate is it's more interesting than the Dashboard/Konfabulator shouting.

Meyer seems to make a good case for the namespace/xhtml argument, but as an outsider to this sort of programming I have no idea if it's a practical one or not.

Tiger isn't supposed to be released for another year, and Dashboard presumably won't be anything other than academic until then, so maybe there is time for Apple to reconsider their postition a little? Or not. They did after all give out boatloads of SDK disks at the developer's conference.


It is pretty mouthwatering to contemplate the possibilites though!

I haven't yet read the whole story about the Canvas tag, Dashboard, and the additionnal properties of the IMG tag, but IMHO, they should either use a different DOCTYPE to introduce NON-STANDARD things or use a dedicated namespace. With the Safari and the Gecko based browsers we, the web "professionnals" and semi-professionnals, finally had the hope to forget all vendor specific code/markup and use the standards for the good of everybody.

Ok, namespaces obfuscate a bit the markup, but they are made to extend a basic language. I've read that that was easier for the Safari dev. team to NOT use a namespace, but personnaly I care more about the vendor specific mess they are introducing than about the complexity to use or not a namespace for them.

Indeed, Dashboard, seems really cool. But damn ( include thousands of exclamation marks ), as Eric Meyer said, "we just left that tag soup party". As good as these extensions may be, they should have their own namespace or DTD.

Looks like there is hope. It appears they may be going with the namespace option:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_07.html#005938

--- RPG Fan ---

Dave Hyatt has earned considerable respect for being both very open and very responsive. I do believe there may be hope for something really remarkably good to come from this initiative.

Ahh - the current situation appears to be as I hoped:
"he (and others) are equating a beta release of Tiger with a shipping release of Tiger. Until Apple actually ships Tiger, then we have not yet extended HTML. What you see in the Tiger beta is a proposal. The syntax of these tags is not frozen"

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
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quote:

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at the moment, javascript is not a standard

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ECMAscript is a standard, but yes, the vendors have different implementations.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

I see what you mean now, I only skimmed through the thread.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

I didn't knew, and still don't know, exactly the position and influancial power of Dave Hyatt on the development of Safari, but indeed he deserves massive respect for his attitude toward the situation. That's pretty cool that they decided to use a namespace.

Regarding JS, I'm also surprised how simple things are not implemented the same way in various browsers. For instance, contrary to what states the "Example 3: Accessing individual characters in a string" of the String object in the reference of JS1.3, the syntax :

var myString = "Hello"

alert( myString[0] ) // (should)returns "H"

The alert does NOT return "H" in MSIE 5.01+ and OPERA 7.50, while it returns "H" in NN4.79 and Gecko based browsers. /me puzzled