Apple showcases HTML5 'standard' - but only if you use its browser

Apple has put up a showcase of HTML5 and CSS3 technologies on its site.

This is a really good idea: it's definitely useful to see what can be achieved with the emerging web standard.

However you're not allowed to click through to any of them unless you're viewing them in Safari (or pretending to) - the implication being that only Safari is an HTML5-capable browser.

This isn't true, of course: Firefox and Google's Chrome and Opera are all HTML5-CSS3-capable to greater and lesser extents, but if you don't have a setting to change the browser's user-agent string to Safari (and Chrome doesn't, any longer: gone are those happy developer beta days; nor does Firefox in its default install) then dammit, you'll have to use Safari.

The demonstrations are interesting enough, though if you want to go and see HTML5 examples, then we'll pass on the (reader-provided) suggestion of HTML5 Watch, which links to examples of work that don't bully you into downloading particular browsers: a post by the Art of Web works fine with its demonstrations of transitions in Chrome, for example.

Update: You can, however, look at the demonstrations without having to download/use Safari by going to the developers' area - where pretty much all of the demos work very effectively. (Perhaps the idea of doing browser detection and pointing out which ones wouldn't work, or would give unexpected results, seemed like too much work. Odd, given that allowing for different incoming browsers including - gasp! - Internet Explorer is how the rest of the Apple site has to function)

Poor show, Apple - good idea, bad implementation. And it's always the implementation that matters.

Yes, you can toot your trumpet in the text accompanying it:

"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."

Certainly that's absolutely true: standards really are not add-ons; and they are, indeed, what makes the web the web.

But it then looks a bit daft to exclude HTML5-aware browsers on the basis that they aren't your particular browser. Is there a tag in HTML5 for irony, or is that waiting for the next round of standards?