The most brilliant part of Apple's marketing here is leveraging infighting and unintended consequences in the free software community. They don't care about open standards - that they would is, on the face of it, absurd. What they do know is that they will evoke much support for championing JS/HTML/CSS as an open plaform, and that it poses no actual threat to their App Store control. This is because of two reasons:
First that there is so much infighting between Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google on the PC browser side, that it will never be possible to deliver video in one way that is accessible to all users, and Flash will remain required on PCs. (Ironically, Mozilla is Adobe's best friend here, as lack of H.264 support for HTML5 in Firefox for the indefinite future - even if your hardware supports it! - ensures that we will never be able to encode once and run on any PC - unless we use Flash!) So HTML5 will never never be a real final solution, because of the PC environment, which makes it safe for Apple to support and champion.
The second reason why HTML is no threat to Apple is that it just is too hard to write real applications in JS and current (or forseeable) browser environments. I get flamed for this a lot, but I think most of the people who flame me have never tried to build and maintain large cross-browser compatible codebases in JS involving a changing team of developers over a long time. People who disagree here always point to nebulous future hopes or technolgies that don't work very well yet, and I think underestimate the difficultly and time this will take, let alone for adoption. And they also, in my opinion, underestimate the problems inherent in Javascript, the language itself, independent of the well known pathologies with browser DOMs.
And, the reason why this marketing strategy is so brilliant is precisely because posts like this one will be viewed as conspiracy theory! This is because people have so many emotional ties to their hopes and their own preferred ways of doing things.
> They don't care about open standards - that they would is, on the face of it, absurd.
They really do care about open standards. There is no reason why WebKit and several other projects have to be run in the open, after they stopped releasing several parts of Darwin, but they are.
At worst, this is because there is more than one person at Apple, and the people who want things to be proprietary don't care about this and have left it to the people who like open standards to deal with.
WebCore and JavaScriptCore are based off KHTML and KJS, but WebKit (which unites the two into a usable API) is Apple code and doesn't have to be open source (it was closed source until 2005).
It doesn't have to be run in the open; they have to release the source whenever they release a new Safari update, but they don't have to do project administration in public or let anyone else access their SVN. This is how several of the Darwin opensource projects work, notably Apple's gcc branch and the kernel.
I keep thinking Apple support for HTML5 is precisely because it has a long way to go, and does not address big media concerns. The gap is filled by the app store which they control, and wont open.
First that there is so much infighting between Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google on the PC browser side, that it will never be possible to deliver video in one way that is accessible to all users, and Flash will remain required on PCs. (Ironically, Mozilla is Adobe's best friend here, as lack of H.264 support for HTML5 in Firefox for the indefinite future - even if your hardware supports it! - ensures that we will never be able to encode once and run on any PC - unless we use Flash!) So HTML5 will never never be a real final solution, because of the PC environment, which makes it safe for Apple to support and champion.
The second reason why HTML is no threat to Apple is that it just is too hard to write real applications in JS and current (or forseeable) browser environments. I get flamed for this a lot, but I think most of the people who flame me have never tried to build and maintain large cross-browser compatible codebases in JS involving a changing team of developers over a long time. People who disagree here always point to nebulous future hopes or technolgies that don't work very well yet, and I think underestimate the difficultly and time this will take, let alone for adoption. And they also, in my opinion, underestimate the problems inherent in Javascript, the language itself, independent of the well known pathologies with browser DOMs.
And, the reason why this marketing strategy is so brilliant is precisely because posts like this one will be viewed as conspiracy theory! This is because people have so many emotional ties to their hopes and their own preferred ways of doing things.