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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

#111

Post by kuschku »

Tomte wrote: post #82
kuschku wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You‘re misinformed. Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up. In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthogr…

You mean, just like in many other languages? According to Wikipedia, French, Icelanding, Spanish, Swedish, and a few more have had varying degrees of prescriptive language standardization.

> Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up.

I just explained why that wasn’t the case. Many linguists in the past have intentionally invented words (see the ones I mentioned) to make the language simpler, and stricter.

And the same continued until today – the drug store chain Rossmann has been a constant supporter of linguistic prescriptivism, has sponsored groups supporting it, and has been using these concepts in all their published material as well. Many other companies engaged in this as well.

The language has never been defined by the people speaking it, but always by the journalists writing it, the linguists describing it, and the companies influencing it.

And German as a whole was created, as pure fiction, by people trying to publish books across the whole of Germany at a time when everyone spoke local dialects.

At no time has German ever been a bottom-up language – and if we already let our language be influenced and shaped by companies, by media – why not at least use similar influence to make it simpler?

Having a language be simple to use is more important than some fake emotional value of being "natural".

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

#112

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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?

Web pages are information held inside containers, not code.

The analogy is a classic example of the "Everything must act like a compiler" fallacy.

There are many situations in which compilation is hopelessly inappropriate as a user model.

Not only is the web one of them, but the hypothetical semantic web is also one of them.

You can't force semantics into compilable tokens. The suggestion that you can - and should - is nonsensical.

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

#113

Post by haberman »

smaddox wrote: post #77
haberman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

What makes that story (in my link) so compelling to me is that it happened to people who were XHTML advocates. They were the people arguing that browsers should be strict. They were the people writing blogging software The Way It Should Be Done, to ensure maximum XHTML compliance. It was a blog entry that was specifically arguing for strict parsing that it became invalid XHTML due to a bug.

If true believers can make this kind of mistake, how often will it happen to people who are just trying to get work done? People will have bugs in their code sometimes, but what should the failure mode be?

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

#114

Post by chrismorgan »

Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that matters cares about them? Why not rather throw in the towel on those particular standards and acknowledge that the WHATWG has won on them?

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

#115

Post by kuschku »

monetus wrote: post #93
kuschku wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> In the absence of a desktop toolkit to rule them all

Qt. Runs everywhere, works everywhere, just fine.

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

#116

Post by Tomte »

kuschku wrote: post #111
Tomte wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You‘re misinformed. Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up. In this reform some non-elected people (who just a few years earlier had said themselves that there job wasn‘t to invent German, but to describe existing use and trends) invented a whole new orthogr…

You mean, just like in many other languages? According to Wikipedia, French, Icelanding, Spanish, Swedish, and a few more have had varying degrees of prescriptive language standardization. > Yes, the German language has had several big changes, but until the reform we‘re talking about it was linguistically „proper“ in that the existing language was described and codified. It was bottom up. I just explained why that w…

You simply don't understand what I have written. I think we can leave it here.

I don't care about your opinion that it's "fake" and "emotional".

Language is a core part of my being, and a fascist power-grab killing my mother tongue is simply a crime against humanity. It's no different from how the Turks have been treating the Kurdish language.

I have only weak hope, but still hope, that we can someday reverse this. Violently or non-violently.

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

#117

Post by gfo »

ma2rten wrote: post #105
qmarchi wrote: post #5

For some clarity: - Mozilla's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380771954 - Apple's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/175#issuecomment-380534425 - Microsoft's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/176 - Google's Objection: https://github.com/w3c/dom/issues/177

It's interesting that a formal objection is done by creating an issue on github.

A sign of the times perhaps? It makes sense given the repository, but of course, it does make it challenging to verify the authenticity of the request when, for all we know by looking at the messages, they could be random users.

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

#118

Post by Analemma_ »

chrismorgan wrote: post #114

Serious question: why are the W3C still publishing or trying to publish standards for DOM and HTML and probably a few others, when no one that matters cares about them? Why not rather throw in the towel on those particular standards and acknowledge that the WHATWG has won on them?

Politics and pride, mostly. It's really rare and difficult for an organization to voluntarily admit that it has no purpose anymore and dissolve itself. That's what the W3C should do, but the realities of human psychology mean that's unlikely to happen.

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

#119

Post by 794CD01 »

tptacek wrote: post #94
scarface74 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Creating a browser isn't the only part of mediating access to web pages. In different senses, Digicert, Comcast, Akamai, and Cisco do that as well.

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

#120

Post by xnyanta »

gfo wrote: post #117
ma2rten wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that a formal objection is done by creating an issue on github.

A sign of the times perhaps? It makes sense given the repository, but of course, it does make it challenging to verify the authenticity of the request when, for all we know by looking at the messages, they could be random users.

It does say that they are members of the W3C organization.
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