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

#41

Post by tptacek » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #33

Latty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 docume…

The idea that standards groups exist to push for top-down reconcepting of how the world should work is a common one, and is also a good reason why standards groups fail. Your idea of what the best outcome is won't be the same as every other stakeholders, and no one stakeholder will have exactly the same idea of the best outcome as the market will.

Ultimately, the market will win, no matter what your standards group says.

The point of standards is interoperability, not rationalization. When standards groups try to rationalize technologies real people work with, they cease to provide value, and instead become obstacles that real engineers end up laboriously working around.

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

#42

Post by kuschku » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

stupidcar wrote: post #31

kuschku wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mozi…

Yes, and today we’re left with a web that you can only parse if you’ve got a few thousand developers and billions of dollars to throw at the issue.

As I wrote below, I offer $100 to anyone that can write a tool that can fully parse and render HTML5, the entire spec, and can a real-life React app, within of 4 weeks, without using any existing library or code for the parsing or rendering.

Doing the same for XHTML and a strict scripting language is easily possible in that time.

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

#43

Post by ChrisSD » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:51 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…

XHTML lost in the marketplace. This was due in part to lack of developer adoption and the fact Internet Explorer ignored it. You could argue that the web community should have forced this through but that simply wasn't working at the time.

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

#44

Post by kuschku » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

olavk wrote: post #40

kuschku wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not true – the WHATWG has already deprecated some HTML specs, and older HTML pages already break today.

XHTML would have worked the same way – after a few years, you can deprecate the old parsers.

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

#45

Post by kuschku » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #39

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…

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.

People trying to build new tools that parse the web.

Try building a crawler without reusing an existing browser engine.

Try running unit tests against your own web projects with Selenium without running a headless browser.

Phantom.JS gave up because they couldn’t keep up with the complexity, and Chrome headless "just works".

Opera gave up on their own browser engine because of the complexity of parsing HTML5 accurately, when the spec is just "whatever Chrome does".

We’ve thrown away an entire ecosystem, just for more flashy graphics.

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

#46

Post by da_chicken » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #4

hacknat wrote: post #3

That’s a flamey title. They’re objecting to them publishing their spec before the negotiations with WHATWG are over.

They're objecting to the simultaneous existence of two DOM standards, to the procedure used by W3C to move forward on the W3C's standard, and to substantive issues in the W3C's fork. Each of the objections refers to the W3C's DOM spec as a "fork". The objectors are members of the WHATWG steering group. The title seems about as neutral a description as can be written. This is a hazard of posting into message threads r…

I think the hazzard is just that the link was posted to the middle of the thread. It's pretty clear what's going on if you read the whole thing and not just the one linked post.

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

#47

Post by pvg » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:54 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?

Would you want any and all systems to have identical failure modes?

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

#48

Post by lucideer » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #17

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?

I don't know of an article, sorry. A brief history from memory would be that during XHTML days the W3C essentially let the HTML spec languish and people weren't moving to XHTML (at best they were moving to XHTML-like HTML). So the WHATWG came along (mainly organised by the major browser vendors) and started the HTML spec moving again. This became part of what's known as HTML5. However WHATWG doesn't exactly make a "s…

To put a slightly different spin on the same story as perspective always colours the telling:

W3C decided to deprecate HTML in favour of XHTML. Most of the web quickly moved to XHTML. One individual (an employee at Opera, then Mozilla, finally and currently Google) wrote an oddly influential opinion piece saying the the move to XHTML had been somehow harmful and pushed for the major browser vendors to form a rival non-democratic standards body (WHATWG) to the W3C, which forked and completely redefined HTML.

The W3C, which unlike the WHATWG has many voting members from many backgrounds, not all related to browser making, quite understandably was never fully on board with the new WHATWG HTML spec efforts. However, with the level of adoption and support it received (mainly from being the creation of the powerful browser vendors) W3C were eventually pressured into conceding to advocate for HTML. Which they've done by maintaining a copy, rather than blindly directing people to the work by what for all intents and purposes effectively amounts to a rival organisation, and an extremely undemocratic one at that.

As web developers, we should follow the WHATWG and ignore the W3C, because the W3C have lost the political battle for HTML and we need to get our stuff working on browsers, all of whom follow WHATWG. But that's an unfortunately pragmatic approach that shouldn't amount to acceptance.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:54 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?

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #37

chrisseaton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

You asked about innovation, not how easy it is for new people to enter the market. Innovation in browsers has definitely gone up and as a user I feel like I'm winning from this with better websites and more powerful web apps.