Tech giants, Apple and Google who are usually known to be on the side of the mission to bring open web standards have faced severe criticism from Chris Blizzard who is a known Open Source Evangelist working for the Mozilla Corporation.
Mr. Blizzard has said that Apple and Google have undermined the progress towards open source web standards by abusing HTML5. His frustration is displayed in the fact thet he praised Microsoft for its delayed acceptance of the open standards.
He is fumed over the new showcase site from Apple that is meant to display Apple’s commitment for web standards. However, the site does not fulfill its purpose and gives the impression that only Safari is supporting such standards.
The site states that “not all browsers offer this support.” It is certain that not all the browsers support such features but Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all support the standards. Apple has blocked other browsers from access to the demonstrations on the site.
Mr. Blizzard has accused Apple of showing off and giving the false impression that only Safari is supporting these standards. He has cited a website that shows information on HTML5 support built into Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
He says that Apple might be using HTML5 for its own agenda. “Basically they are saying internally ‘omg, no one thinks we support html5, we need to prove them otherwise! We’ll put up tests! Demos! The world will then know and we can go back to being perceived as actually leading the WebKit project which is also made of puppies and rainbows!'” he wrote.
Many users have already applied the HTML5 moniker much more than HTML5 and Apple is following the flow by adding things like CSS under HTML5. He accuses Google who first took charge during its annual developer conference last year.
“The big problem is that html5 has come to mean a lot of things, mostly thanks to Google. They’ve basically been riding that and flogging it and making it their own,” Blizzard said. He referred to the claims of Google that Chrome is the fastest program in the world.
He wrote that Apple is a victim as the main player is Google however with the move like this it has also become a part of his criticism. He said Google tried to show Native Client and the Chrome Store as part of the HTML5 during this year’s Google I/O developer conference.
Google is overstepping web standards with Native Client that encourages developers to create native code applications that run on plug-ins that are currently only available on Chrome. The Chrome App Store takes the apps into Apple iPhone store space.