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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

#91

Post by colanderman »

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…

> not all related to browser making, quite understandably was never fully on board with the new WHATWG HTML spec efforts.

That's the other thing that pisses me off about the WHATWG, is how much they shit all over XML and other interoperability technologies. E.g. their URL standard (because, why not fuck the IETF as well) basically ignores anything non-HTTP for specious reasons.

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

#92

Post by PeterisP »

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…

"That’s great if you’re either an existing browser vendor, using a browser, or developing a broken website." - and that's the whole point, in the marketplace the convenience of these people matters much, much, much more than the convenience of those people who want to "try to write a new browser from scratch, or a tool to scrape websites."

If you want to scrape websites or show them in a browser, then you have to follow the needs of makers of these sites, because you need them and they don't need you. If you want to go to the right and they want to go to the left, you either follow them or go alone and become unable to scrape or browse their content. If there's a feature that they want to use that makes your parsing more complicated, tough luck, that feature is going in as long as somebody (e.g. major browser vendors) will agree to make it work.

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

#93

Post by monetus »

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…

It would be awesome if the layers of the browser would allow for a more parseable, document-based web. That would be an effort towards standardization.

But are you really advocating for removing dynamic media from the browser? That seems like an incredible step backwards in most regards. In the absence of a desktop toolkit to rule them all, browser standardization is what we are left with right?

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

#94

Post by tptacek »

scarface74 wrote: post #79
tptacek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 buildin…

The lineage of the rendering engine doesn't matter. What gives Apple and Google and Microsoft command of the standard is the fact that they mediate access to web pages; they own th actual customers. That's what matters.

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

#95

Post by tptacek »

xg15 wrote: post #87
tptacek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The alternative (and current reality) is that the same things are decided by about four companies in an entirely intransparent manner. At least the W3C had processes and a wide array of members.

Isn't that just theater? None of them can tell Apple and Google what to put in their browsers; in fact, if they can't convince just one of the big 4 browser vendors to do something, their standards have no meaning at all.

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

#96

Post by lambda »

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.

The WHATWG has not always opposed the W3C's spec. The WHATWG explicitly agreed to work with the W3C to form an edited, snapshot spec based on the WHATWG spec. That's what HTML5 was supposed to be.

However, the W3C process then hijacked this, by dropping things from the WHATWG spec, adding things back that had been removed because they had never been implemented properly and implementing them wouldn't have been very useful, and so on. The WHATWG objected to this useless divergence.

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

#97

Post by tptacek »

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…

What does it even mean to parse a React app? Crawlers can't resolve the halting problem, either.

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

#98

Post by cptskippy »

dooglius wrote: post #89
cptskippy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the same way Apple was forced to adopt USB Type-C? What in the what now? Apple adopted the latest USB standard as a way to reduce the BOM on it's devices by consolidating ports. They did the same thing with the iMac almost 20 years ago. No one is twisting their arm on it, if anything people are asking them to not jump whole hog on USB Type-C but instead take a gradual approach to adopting it.

Clarified; I had mistakenly thought this was the result of EU regulation, but it looks like they were already considered in compliance before that[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#R...

That legislation was specific to mobile phones and has since expired. It asked that chargers either have USB Type A Female or USB Type Micro B Male connectors, Apple already offered Type A Female and thus was always in compliance.

It would not surprise me if there were similar legislation around Type C however the industry is still coming to terms with Type C and so I don't anticipate that happening for a few years.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

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

#100

Post by Analemma_ »

amelius wrote: post #2

When is W3C going to formalize their standards? It's one thing to write down "user agent should do such and such" and quite another thing to formalize it.

Never, because there is no W3C-designed standard anymore. Today they just take snapshots of the WHATWG standard every N months, slap their name on it, and call that a standard. The browser vendors roll their eyes at this because they couldn't care less about the W3C and what it publishes, but they've tolerated it as long as it wasn't causing any problems.

The issue here is that now the W3C seems to want to actually make a real standard of their own, and the vendors are going "No. Go away."

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