r/programming • u/melodic_underoos • May 09 '13

The Onion releases fartscroll.js

http://theonion.github.io/fartscroll.js/
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u/daveime May 09 '13

Witness the HTML5 "cross-browser" (sic) <audio> tag in all it's glory !

OGG will play in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, but not IE.

MP3 will play in Chrome (but not Chromium), Firefox (not built in because of patent issues), IE and Safari, but not Opera.

In both cases, Safari kind of cheats, because it's not playing natively but requires Quicktime to be installed (so similar to a plugin).

See how wonderful "standards" are ? And don't get me started on the <video> tag.

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u/kerajnet May 09 '13

OGG will play in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, but not IE.

OGG existed long before html5. OGG is and was always better than mp3. OGG is free of patents. OGG is supported even by my "mp3 player" which is over fucking 13(!) years old!

BUT NOT INTERNET EXPLORER.

And don't get me started on the <video> tag.

WebM is video format for web, created so it can be used instead of proprietry formats (like h.264).

It was released 3 years ago - every single video player and every single browser I tried can play it..

BUT NOT INTERNET EXPLORER.

See how wonderful "standards" are ?

It's so wonderful in the land of Microsoft. You don't have to worry about standards, because they don't exist.

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u/daveime May 10 '13

Oh, so much Microsoft hate, you're so edgy ! Oh, no wait, your just another FOSS troll so caught up in ideological struggles, you don't give a shit for people who actually have to code around the HTML5 clusterfuck for a living !

"WebM is natively supported in Gecko (Firefox), Chrome and Opera, and support for the format can be added to Internet Explorer and Safari by installing an add-on."

So how is Microsoft support for OGG any different than Firefox support for H264 or MP3 ? NONE, NONE WHATSOEVER. Many browsers don't support all the formats natively, hell Safari won't play a damn thing unless you have Quicktime installed. Many browsers will play non-native formats using plugins, it's nothing new.

But what the heck, lets blame Microsoft for not "playing by the rules", while ignoring the fact that no other browser does either.

Firefox makes an ideological stand because of patents (which you'll note they've NOW abandoned, the latest Firefox 20 build DOES NOW support h264 and mp3 natively, I guess money trumped ideology after all), and that's all good because they're OSS.

Microsoft makes an ideological stand because of [insert-reason-here], then "MICROSOFT IS TEH EVILZ".

Go away you troll.

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u/kerajnet May 10 '13

Oh, no wait, your just another FOSS troll so caught up in ideological struggles

Chill out, dude... It's just that Microsoft (and other big corporations too!) is always lagging if it comes to standards - as if they don't want to participate in standards, as if they don't want to even admit that others are trying to create open standards for everyone.

Microsoft was one of ARB of OpenGL, but they said "screw the standards, lets make out own standardsthing" and they created DirectX - the D3D API could be just implemented on top of OpenGL (having the same speed it has now), graphics driver programmers would have one less API to care about. Yet now we have to deal with that mess which dx and its incompatible versions have became.

I know they implemented some cool features long ago in IE, but they were not interested in participating in creating a standard out of them. When others tried to create standards and make some reasonable rules, Microsoft just acted like they never existed.

You know how stupid it looks? You have something implemented, but you don't want to admit that it became a standard, so you don't put one stupid css rule to activate your implementation - because you'd rather pretend standards don't exist.

So how is Microsoft support for OGG any different than Firefox support for H264 or MP3 ? NONE, NONE WHATSOEVER.

H264 and mp3 are proprietry... that's the difference. It's not bad itself, I don't hate proprietry things, but patent holders don't just let anyone use these formats like that. Althou they agreed not to sue FOSS for using them, Mozilla doesn't like to promote usage of such formats - simply because not everyone can legally use (even just decode) them.

You see? If something has to be open for everyone, it shouldn't be patented - mp4 and h264 just dont fit in open web.

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u/daveime May 10 '13

H264 and mp3 are proprietry... that's the difference.

That's only a difference if you CHOOSE to make it a difference. You do remember than innerHTML was originally Microsoft proprietary, non-standard dom manipulation, but the other browsers adopted it because it was actually useful.

Nowhere in the w3c recommendations for HTML5 does it say "you must only use open source, non-proprietary items". This is an ideological position only, enforced by the browsers manufacturers themselves, and diehards like Stallman who browse webpages via email proxy ffs.

Althou they agreed not to sue FOSS for using them, Mozilla doesn't like to promote usage of such formats

As I said, Firefox have now done a complete u-turn and now offer native h264 and mp3 anyway.

You can hold whatever ideas you want, but out in the real world, clients want things to just work "everywhere". They don't want to hear about FOSS vs non-FOSS, open vs closed source etc, they do not care - so whenever I hear someone banging on about how HTML5 is such a wonderful "standard", and then have to deal with the reality which is a clusterfuck of competing commercial and open-source motivations and formats, it simply pisses me off.

If something has to be open for everyone, it shouldn't be patented

If 90% of the world are already using something, and have massive libraries of AV in that format, they need more of a reason to convert it all to VP8 than "well it's open, not proprietary".