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

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

#61

Post by ChrisSD »

lucideer wrote: post #48
ChrisSD wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

I'm not certain that it's true to say most of the web quickly moved to XHTML. Sure a number of sites advertised themselves as XHTML but they were not strictly XHTML compliant. This could be due to third party widgets or other included code or it could be due to a mistake in template construction. Whatever the issue fully compliant XHTML wasn't used much in practice outside of hand-crafted pages.

Also Internet Explorer, for example, never implemented XHTML which would have been a deal breaker for many sites.

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

#62

Post by scarface74 »

We know that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, consider the WHATWG to be the canonical version. We don't yet know whether the other 450+ W3C member organisations that represent the wider web platform agree with this position or not though.

Honestly, do the other 450+ W3C member organizations matter? (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List)

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

#63

Post by kuschku »

tptacek wrote: post #53
kuschku wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules. We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school. Back then, many older books were still using the old rules. By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been r…

That sounds horrible.

It was amazing. The new orthography is much simpler, and has far fewer insane rules or exceptions. And most people that have seen the transition, but were born after it, or went to school during it, agree.

I know it can work on this scale, I’ve seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy.

You can do the same on the web. You just need to have all vendors working together to actually do it.

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

#64

Post by msoucy »

kuschku wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules. We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school. Back then, many older books were still using the old rules. By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been r…

What language is this? This sounds fascinating.

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

#65

Post by Hello71 »

lucideer wrote: post #48
ChrisSD wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

> Most of the web quickly moved to XHTML

Ridiculous and absurd. A small proportion of the web moved to invalid XHTML that rendered as tag soup because it was sent as text/html. Virtually no websites actually served XHTML as XHTML, because: 1. there were and still are no compelling technical benefits of XHTML, 2. it broke Internet Explorer, 3. most webmasters were and still are incompetent and have no clue what Content-Type is.

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

#66

Post by anonymfus »

tptacek wrote: post #56
lucideer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

That seems to ignore the conventional wisdom that according-to-Hoyle XHTML was a DOA standard because it mandated error handling in ways that no browser implemented and most of the authoring community didn't want. Authors don't write well-formed XML, even today.

>because it mandated error handling in ways that no browser implemented

IIRC Opera implemented XHTML error handling.

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

#67

Post by kuschku »

msoucy wrote: post #64
kuschku wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a child in elementary school, a standards committee decided to change my native language. They replaced the spelling of most words, and many grammatical rules. We were forced to obey these changes, any use of the old rules was counted as mistake in school. Back then, many older books were still using the old rules. By the time I left high school, almost no books with the old rules were left. All had been r…

What language is this? This sounds fascinating.

My example was the implementation of the German orthography and language reforms between 1996 and 2006 (I went to elementary school in 2002, when implementing it was still in progress, and most stuff was still using the old spelling, I left high school in 2014).

But French has their Academy, which has even more power over language, and afaik, Spain supposedly has similar governing bodies.

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

#68

Post by tptacek »

kuschku wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds horrible.

It was amazing. The new orthography is much simpler, and has far fewer insane rules or exceptions. And most people that have seen the transition, but were born after it, or went to school during it, agree. I know it can work on this scale, I’ve seen it IRL. Many languages do stuff like this, German has the council of German language, and French has their Academy. You can do the same on the web. You just need to have…

The idea that a bunch of standards group officials can decide for the world that web pages are simply lightweight content publishing mechanisms and that real applications should be build exclusively in Flash and that that worldview can be ratified and mandated by browser vendors does not seem amazing to me.

At any rate: the Internet is a market system, not a top-down autocracy.

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

#69

Post by chrisseaton »

kuschku wrote: post #54
chrisseaton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many new browsers do you see? Is that innovation in browsers? Browser competition and innovation is at its lowest ever. Chrome holds 2/3rds usage globally. I don’t want more powerful ways to display ads, I want to get more content, better connected, without any of the fluff around it.

> Browser competition and innovation is at its lowest ever.

I don't care directly about competition, because that's just a means to an end, and the end I care about is innovation, and I don't agree that innovation is low - I think it's high. New HTML features are coming out in a fast continuous stream, unlike how it used to be.

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

#70

Post by olavk »

kuschku wrote: post #44
olavk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, WHATWG have deprecated some elements not widely used (like "isindex", "font"), but the documents using these elements will still be readable even if not exactly as the author intended. Moving to XHTML, on the other hand, would make billions of pages totally inaccessible.

There are people who are now dead who have pages on the internet. These pages will never be updated.

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