A whole lot of FUD here.<p>1. Check out the CSS validation link; mostly there are rules included for CSS3 properties that are not yet standardized and Apple has provided vendor specific rules for many browsers that don't validate. So you're really nailing them here for adding cross-platform compatibility to their home page? Kinda weak "evidence."<p>2. One of the HTML5 validation errors is adding the X-UA-Compatible flag for IE. Again, Apple goes outside the spec (as TONS of sites do) to be cross platform.<p>3. You end your article by stating that, "For Apple, the showcase isn’t really about web standards; It’s about their own version of web standards." At the same time, the Apple website works diligently through the CSS3 and HTML5 markup to bring the best possible experience to a very wide range of browsers. Moreover, you state that the demos work in Chrome if you spoof the user agent. If that's the case, isn't that showing that Apple's using <i>real</i> web standards and not "their own version?"<p>4. You claim that, "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." There is no defined specification for how a website should determine what browser a visitor is using EXCEPT to use the User Agent String. There are many who advocate using feature detection (and this is, in many cases, a better approach)--but your statement that using the user agent is "wrong" is categorically incorrect.<p>5. Those demos are being used as a marketing tool by Apple for the Safari browser--I'm not going to fault a company for building a marketing tool and then leveraging that tool.<p>Honestly, I'm kinda surprised I found the motivation to write this much about your poorly crafted article. You're basically taking a shot at Apple who's doing what basically everyone else is doing on their main site to ensure cross-platform compatibility (in fact, by the looks of that CSS validator output--they're doing MORE than most). Then you bash them for restricting their demos to their own browser which, while maybe not the most "open" thing in the world, certainly doesn't imply that they've somehow created their own "subset" of the standards.
A paragraph and a half in, this rant turns away from "This page doesn't validate" to "Apple is doing it wrong." It sounds a bit like you're being anti-Apple for the sake of having something to rant about.<p>Pretty much every one of the errors is either "This doesn't always exist in some browser" or parse errors. Aren't these properties either A. ignored or B. actually parsed correctly by the browser they're intended for?<p>And so what? Google.com doesn't validate, nor does Microsoft.com.
The W3C validator is not up to date and does not understand vendor prefixes. Until they make the validator consider real-world web apps, and not just academic markup, I won't take them seriously.