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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

#71

Post by Tomte »

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…

If you‘re talking about German, it was not amazing, but a cultural catastrophe, and an extra-legal totalitarian nightmare.

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

#72

Post by tptacek »

scarface74 wrote: post #62

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 )

No.

They could matter, if they built a browser with competing market share. It's not a static equilibrium.

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

#73

Post by stupidcar »

kuschku wrote: post #42
stupidcar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That was the situation prior to the writing of the HTML5 spec, not a situation it created. The majority of the web was not, and never would have been parsable as strict XHTML, whatever the desire of the W3C or anybody else. And even for new content, the idea that every hand-authored file would be well-formed, or that every half-baked and buggy CMS would always produce correct markup was a pipe-dream.

If strict parsing had been enforced, we'd have a web where a large proportion of the sites you visited each day would be broken. Or rather, we wouldn't, because complaints from users would have long ago forced browser vendors to implement graceful error handling, and so you'd end up with something akin to HTML5 anyway. Indeed, it was encountering precisely this problem that made vendors like Mozilla and Opera (who, incidentally, never had billions of dollars) to lose faith in XHTML in the first place, not some masochistic desire to keep their browsers' code as complicated as possible.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #42
stupidcar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by kuschku »

pvg wrote: post #55
kuschku wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accurate…

That's a pretty tiny 'everybody else' compared to users, web and browser developers. They seem to be doing mostly ok and I still don't follow your argument that their concerns should somehow reign supreme over those of, you know, the actual everybody else.

It’s a tiny "everybody else" because it never was given a chance to develop.

Maybe you’d also say that the number of people that want to do their online banking with a desktop program that isn’t provided by their bank is a tiny "everybody else".

Yet in places where OpenHBCI exists, many people use it – and there is an ecosystem around it, e.g. KMyMoney can integrate with it, and there’s a small widget for KDE to show your current account balance in your tray.

If we had a machine parseable web, a similar ecosystem would have developed. When embedding links today, we use OpenGraph tags. But why? If the web was directly machine readable, we could’ve directly embedded that content.

Google search shows you as preview excerpts of tables on a page, with an easily machine readable web, similar stuff could’ve happened here.

Maybe instead of only embedding YouTube videos, I would have been able to easily embed any part of any web page into any other. Maybe I would have been able to easily embed any part of any web page in a desktop application. Maybe I would have been able to build addons that easily search over content of web pages, in a structured way.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #62

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 )

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by smaddox »

haberman wrote: post #59
smaddox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, it seems reasonable, and the analogy with programming languages seems to make sense. But there's a big difference. With programming languages, you write a program, and when it's correct, you check it in and it's immutable until you check in a new version. Web pages are composited on-the-fly by programs that combine static files, database content, content from third parties, etc. The only way you guarantee a vali…

Thanks for the link. I can certainly see how making the transition now is pretty much untenable, but I'm not 100% sold that it wouldn't be a good idea if everyone had adopted the policy from the start. I can certainly see how it would still be important for browsers to have a mode where they do their best to render the page, but it's less clear that it should be the default. Even if it was the default, then I would expect variations in different browsers ability to recover from errors would lead developers to being much more careful about allowing errors to creep in.

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

#78

Post by colanderman »

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…

> The WHATWG has always opposed the W3C's spec. They see it as confusing to have two "official" specifications.

As the old joke goes... if it hurts, they should stop doing that!

The WHATWG spec is worse than useless to me as a developer. It's impossible to tell what is usable and what is just Google's wishlist (which is about half of it). The MDN has entirely replaced it for me, since they at least do a good job of documenting reality.

WHATWG should quit trying to bully the W3C out of the field, and instead clearly mark the WHATWG "spec" as what it is: a public notepad for browser developers. Leave the business of documenting what browsers actually conform to to the W3C.

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

#79

Post by scarface74 »

tptacek wrote: post #72
scarface74 wrote: post #62

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 )

No. They could matter, if they built a browser with competing market share. It's not a static equilibrium.

Did you look at the list of members? Who on the list is going to be building their own browser and what would the business case be? Out of the big four, only two of them even thought it made sense to build a browser from scratch. Apple and Google started off with KHTML.

EDIT:

To clarify. Who is going to be building their own rendering engine instead of taking an existing one - 3 of the 4 are open source - and building a browser on top?

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

#80

Post by kuschku »

Tomte wrote: post #71
kuschku wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you‘re talking about German, it was not amazing, but a cultural catastrophe, and an extra-legal totalitarian nightmare.

I assume you’re older than 22? There’s pretty much a strict split at around that age. People older seem to consistently hate it, people younger seem to consistently like it, because the new rules are much simpler.

Previously, Gruß and Kuß had no info about how long to pronounce the u – Gruß and Kuss do. And until 2017, capitalizing them into GRUSS and KUSS lost this information, now GRUẞ and KUSS keep it.

Previously, for many words, the rules when to split the word, when to write them together, when to use – was insanity. Now it’s all in a few easy rules.

And you have to remember, this wasn’t the first time German went through such changes – ever since the advent of the printing press, when a written German language was basically "invented" from the many dialects that existed, until today, there have been proponents of a prescriptive language evolution, and they’ve had lots of influence over time.

When you use Tarnen, Verfasser, or Absender, Abstand, Bücherei, Augenblick, Leidenschaft, Entwurf or Briefwechsel, Rechtschreibung or Tagebuch, Grundlage, Altertum, Erdgeschoss, tatsächlich or Hochschule, all these words were defined top-down. (All these words are just from Philipp von Zesen, Christian Wolff, and Joachim Heinrich Campe)

A massive amount of what we consider "German" today was defined and changed top-down, and without these changes, German wouldn’t be recognizable.

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