Apple Blocks Competing Browsers While Promoting 'Standards'

In keeping with its effort to promote HTML5 as the future and to cast Adobe Flash as the past, Apple on Friday launched a new series of Web pages called "HTML5 Showcase."

HTML5 is the emerging standard for next generation of Web pages and applications. It remains a draft specification and isn't expected to be finalized for years.

Apple has been promoting HTML5 as an alternative to Flash, which company CEO Steve Jobs has spent the past few months deriding as slow, power-hungry, insecure, ill-suited for touch-based devices, and deleterious to the progress of the iPhone OS platform.

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Apple's crusade against Flash continues in its HTML5 Showcase with its observation that HTML5, as a standard, isn't an add-on to the Web (like Flash).

Adobe has challenged Jobs' claims and has partnered with Google to bring Flash to the company's Android devices as a way of vindicating its technology.

Apple's HTML5 Showcase features demos of various HTML5 capabilities related to audio, video, image presentation and transitions, typography, 3D imagery and virtual reality.

"The demos below show how the latest version of Apple's Safari Web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript," the company says. "Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same Web standards -- and the amazing things they enable Web designers to do."

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