Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#31

Post by stupidcar » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #10

chrisseaton wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an article with the background on this? Why do we have both the W3C and the WHATWG, and why do the W3C just copy and paste work from WHATWG, if that is indeed what happens?

The W3C was the original standardization organization for the web. They wanted to create standards that allow easy implementation by others, and were willing to make some tradeoffs with backwards compatibility for that (see XHTML). The browser vendors obviously oppose this, and want standards that just formalize what they already implement. As result, the browser vendors created their own standards committee, which s…

No, it wasn't simply a question of backwards compatibility. The W3C wanted (wants?) to pursue its own quixotic vision of a semantic, machine-readable web. One in which the needs of human users, browser user agents and use cases like web apps was of incidental importance at best.

The HTML5 spec effort that gave birth to WHATWG wasn't simply about documenting backwards compatible parsing, it was about vendors like Mozilla and Opera wanting to evolve HTML in a way that added actually useful new features, something that W3C had zero interest in at the time.

Nowadays, the W3C's behaviour seems to be driven entirely by an institutional desire to justify its own existence, and protect its revenue stream and its self-assumed position as the one-true source of web standards, by engaging in bad-faith practices like taking standards produced through the hard work of others, removing all citations, making breaking changes, and publishing it as a competing "standard".

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#32

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #28

Latty wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can make a self-driving train far more easily than I can make a self-driving car. You are comparing two things that aren't equivalent. The living standard provides a lot more value than the old specs, and that's why they won .

The living standards winning is something we should see as tragedy, not as something good. We’ve made parsing the web something that only massive corporations can do. We’ve made building a browser so complicated that even Opera gave up after the complexity of HTML5, and we’re now left with only 4 major browser engines, of which 2 share a significant amount of code. Do you see an innovative ecosystem there? We’re left…

> Do you see an innovative ecosystem there?

Yes! Everyone says that the specification approach is what was severely limiting innovation, and when they took the living specification approach instead that's when web innovation took off again.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#33

Post by kuschku » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

Latty wrote: post #27

kuschku wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web. Okay, let’s make a deal: We both write a crawler that can fully reliably parse websites. I implement XHTML1.1, you implement HTML5. We both get 1 month time. What do you t…

And if we were all using XHTML1.1 now instead, yes, your parser would be easier, except all the richer content would be in flash, and all the web apps would be desktop applications, and you wouldn't be able to parse that at all, even with a full browser. You are acting like everyone would just stop and wait for you to make your dream implementation that's ideal - that's not how the world works. WHATWG was an admissio…

You’re assuming XHTML1.1 would never have evolved further, never have gotten more content.

And Flash, despite its flaws, would have been a much better starting point for rich content than the ecosystem we have today.

Many of the features Flash provided are only available in browsers today through babel.js transpilation. As result, we’re stuck with a language without stdlib and broken syntax.

We’re stuck with a document model that’s impossible to work with or parse, and with impossible layout management.

If you want web applications, it’d make much more sense to port the Android layout XML format to the web than to attempt to use HTML5 for it, because HTML5 is insanity for building applications.

> and all the web apps would be desktop applications

I don’t see that as anything bad.

The web is for documents, and lightly interactive content. All the rich applications on the web are opaque to any crawler I could write anyway, as I just get "You need JS to view this React app". Desktop applications would be just as parseable, except they would also be less of a resource hog.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#34

Post by maxerickson » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #22

cwmma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're downplaying the shit show that was XHTML. It was the epitome of standards people chasing the ideal of a perfect platonic ideal of a standard at the cost of actual usability. E.G. a single parse error in an XHTML document and it doesn't render at all. That all by itself was a deal breaker for many people.

That’s great if you’re either an existing browser vendor, using a browser, or developing a broken website. But if you actually try to write a new browser from scratch, or a tool to scrape websites, you’ll learn to love XHTML, and hate HTML5. The same that applies with human languages applies here as well. Writing a vocaloid for japanese is a high school programming class project. Writing a TTS for english takes thous…

I'm pretty sure javascript heavy pages would exist even in a strict parsing world.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#35

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

smaddox wrote: post #29

cwmma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're downplaying the shit show that was XHTML. It was the epitome of standards people chasing the ideal of a perfect platonic ideal of a standard at the cost of actual usability. E.G. a single parse error in an XHTML document and it doesn't render at all. That all by itself was a deal breaker for many people.

That seems reasonable to me. Would you want your programming language to compile code that has a syntax error?

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#36

Post by Latty » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #28

Latty wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can make a self-driving train far more easily than I can make a self-driving car. You are comparing two things that aren't equivalent. The living standard provides a lot more value than the old specs, and that's why they won .

The living standards winning is something we should see as tragedy, not as something good. We’ve made parsing the web something that only massive corporations can do. We’ve made building a browser so complicated that even Opera gave up after the complexity of HTML5, and we’re now left with only 4 major browser engines, of which 2 share a significant amount of code. Do you see an innovative ecosystem there? We’re left…

Yes, and before that there were maybe 1.5 viable ways to render flash content.

Then you need to take that `.exe` and try and pull out it's content. Game, app, whatever.

We have a web that can be parsed, with difficulty, instead of a web without half of the content we want to parse.

The web was being replaced - this is what saved it, like it or not.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#37

Post by kuschku » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #32

kuschku wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The living standards winning is something we should see as tragedy, not as something good. We’ve made parsing the web something that only massive corporations can do. We’ve made building a browser so complicated that even Opera gave up after the complexity of HTML5, and we’re now left with only 4 major browser engines, of which 2 share a significant amount of code. Do you see an innovative ecosystem there? We’re left…

> Do you see an innovative ecosystem there? Yes! Everyone says that the specification approach is what was severely limiting innovation, and when they took the living specification approach instead that's when web innovation took off again.

Oh? How many tools do you know that can parse a current HTML5 react app without importing any existing browser?

Every tool we have to use on the web relies on 4 existing tools that only major companies can build.

I’ll pay you $100 if you manage to write, in 4 weeks, a browser, from scratch, that renders a real life React app accurately, including all content, without importing a single bit of code or libraries from existing browsers or web tools.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#38

Post by robin_reala » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #16

Latty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To offer another perspective. I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web. As browsers started just implementing features outside of standards in completely disparate ways because everyone was desperate for them (leadi…

> This lead to the W3C specs becoming totally redundant and the only way for W3C to keep up was to lamely try to copy from WHATWG into a "spec" at random intervals and claim it was something people could work towards So why don't they just disband the W3C? It sounds like it's not needed any more if WHATWG are doing the work?

W3C do a huge amount more than HTML and DOM. All of CSS is coordinated through there for example.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#39

Post by pvg » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #23

Latty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To offer another perspective. I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web. As browsers started just implementing features outside of standards in completely disparate ways because everyone was desperate for them (leadi…

> I'd say the W3C wasted a huge amount of time pursuing quests of purity (XHTML) over actually making the web better for users. I see the value in what they were trying to do, but it wasn't letting people do the things they wanted to do on the web. Okay, let’s make a deal: We both write a crawler that can fully reliably parse websites. I implement XHTML1.1, you implement HTML5. We both get 1 month time. What do you t…

HTML5 is amazing for existing browser vendors, developers, and in the short-term, users. But everyone else loses. Horribly.

I don't understand who the 'everybody else' is in this case and what and when their horrible losing will be.

Re: Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec

#40

Post by olavk » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #22

cwmma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're downplaying the shit show that was XHTML. It was the epitome of standards people chasing the ideal of a perfect platonic ideal of a standard at the cost of actual usability. E.G. a single parse error in an XHTML document and it doesn't render at all. That all by itself was a deal breaker for many people.

That’s great if you’re either an existing browser vendor, using a browser, or developing a broken website. But if you actually try to write a new browser from scratch, or a tool to scrape websites, you’ll learn to love XHTML, and hate HTML5. The same that applies with human languages applies here as well. Writing a vocaloid for japanese is a high school programming class project. Writing a TTS for english takes thous…

But the web already contains billions of pages which do not conform to XHTML. Any browser or scraper would still have to able to parse those to be of any use. Adding XHTML would just be an additional parser frontend, it would not simplify anything.