Archit Tantia

Taken from Apple’s website (HTML5 Section):

Every new Apple mobile device and every new Mac — along with the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser — supports web standards including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. These web standards are open, reliable, highly secure, and efficient. They allow web designers and developers to create advanced graphics, typography, animations, and transitions. Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support! Sounds really good but wait, with a pledge on making the web more accessible with the support of the latest web standards, ever though about validating your own website Apple?

While validating the HTML5 and CSS3 markup, I found 2 errors and 275 errors respectively.

It’s nice to see a company like Apple which has excelled in popularizing devices like the tablets, talking about HTML5. Their HTML5 section showcases a lot of the latest web standards. Unfortunately, the way they are presenting the showcase, you would come to the conclusion that Safari is the only web browser that supports these latest web standards. Don’t believe me? Try visiting the site with any other browser and you’ll get a message telling you to download Safari to view the demos.

After boasting so much about web standards, Apple is detecting the user-agent string and only allowing Safari users to see the galleries. Not only is user-agent detection the wrong way to determine the HTML5 capabilities of the current browser, one could easily spoof the browser’s user-agent to fool the websites.

I had to spoof the user-agent in Firefox and Chrome to test Apple’s demos in these browsers. Most of the test worked perfectly on Firefox 4 RC1. As Chrome uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari everything worked without any issues in it.

For Apple, the showcase isn’t really about web standards; It’s about their own version of web standards.

P.S. Mozilla’s HTML5 demo page doesn’t block the other browsers!