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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

#141

Post by coding123 »

colanderman wrote: post #78
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…

> 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 d…

I think that's the rub - if w3c wants to "document" what a browser conforms to - I imagine it will be a copy-paste from what the browser vendors are doing in their separate meetings of the minds.

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

#142

Post by kbrosnan »

manigandham wrote: post #128

What a monumental waste of time. Why not just ignore W3C entirely? Seriously, what exactly are they going to do? Publish more? Sometimes it's better to not be nice and just let reality finish the job. So much effort taken from people who clearly have better things to do...

Unless you follow browser or specification development you are unlikely to know about WHATWG.

In talking to teachers and web developers few know about the difference between the W3C and WHATWG. The W3C still has the mindshare lead.

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

#143

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

#144

Post by chias »

xtian wrote: post #122
Sharlin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the web quickly moved to XHTML. This simply is not true. The web moved to an XHTML-like dialect of HTML which was still served as text/html and browsers interpreted it as "HTML soup" because actually serving pages as application/xhtml+xml would have broken the majority of the web because browsers would actually validate them and refuse to display a page at all if there was even a single missing close tag.

And the versions of IE in use didn’t support application/xhtml+xml anyway so you would have to switch to text/html based on the user agent string. It was never clear what the technical benefit of this was supposed to be. I only ever saw one site whose pages served double duty as an API and UI by serving styled XML. It seemed like a challenging approach to pull off well.

The Gentoo website / handbook does this.

Or rather, did this a few years ago when I was last messing around with Gentoo. It seems to be HTML now.

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

#145

Post by colanderman »

y4mi wrote: post #121
colanderman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Urm, I thought MDN was based on WHATWG? (Not W3C)

MDN includes clear documentation about what is actually implemented in all major browsers (the compatibility tables), so I (as someone who wants my code to work everywhere now, not next year) can tell at a glance what pie-in-the-sky ideas I should ignore.

That's great that it's based on the WHATWG's work – it should be, since it should document what's in Firefox, and Firefox presumably is following their own work with the WHATWG. But the WHATWG shouldn't pretend that they're useful to me in any other way than a preview of what's coming down the pipeline. For that, I need clear documentation of what is, not what will be. W3C HTML specs prior to HTML 5 (with the exception of the abortion that was XHTML 2) have historically served that purpose well. It was easy to make the judgement that, once my target market primarily supported HTML 4, I could use anything in that spec. The WHATWG "spec" throws that idea out the window.

Ideally, with a "living standard", periodically there are snapshots of some form that document what all or most major browsers supported as of some point in time. So I as a developer can say, "well I know most of my target market have updated their browsers since date X, so I can just use anything in this standard snapshot". The W3C I think is trying to do this. They might not be doing a very good job (indeed that is the crux of the WHATWG's objections); like I said, I personally rely on MDN to fill this same role for me. But the WHATWG living standard itself cannot fill this role, short of including MDN-style compatibility tables, or making their own snapshots that are somehow "better" than what the W3C puts out.

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

#146

Post by fjsolwmv »

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…

That particular person is longtime leading advocate for "humanitarian eugenics" for promoting the "advancement of civilization", so undemocratic elitism in web standards is fitting with their overall worldview.

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

#147

Post by cwyers »

scarface74 wrote: post #106
tptacek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox doesn't own the customer. But creating a rendering engine from scratch is hard and there is no business case for anyone doing it from scratch. Apple didn't (they tried with CyberDog ages ago) they used KHTML to create WebKit. Google didn't either, they started with WebKit. Opera gave up on their own rendering engine years ago.

Why is "creating a rendering engine from scratch" the bar here? A new player could fork Blink or WebKit.

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

#148

Post by baybal2 »

manigandham wrote: post #128

What a monumental waste of time. Why not just ignore W3C entirely? Seriously, what exactly are they going to do? Publish more? Sometimes it's better to not be nice and just let reality finish the job. So much effort taken from people who clearly have better things to do...

W3C attempts to make proper web standards.

Apple Google MS break them and and try to push for substandard specs pushed through W3C.

As a web developer for 11 years, I can state that web development is devolving to chaos of IE6 era.

When W3C allowed itself to be subverted and let big dotcom browsermakers to hijack the process.

A result of that is the continuous bloating of the acting web standard, when you have dozens of new abandonware APIs being showed into the spec on a whim, and no focus on things that should really matter.

It is 2018, and yet browser makers still have open CSS bugs from the previous decade that are banal to fix, yet all they care is how to stuff yet another API useless outside their own business setup.

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

#149

Post by fjsolwmv »

kuschku wrote: post #23
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…

> 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…

In the long run, we're all dead. We need short term solutions.

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

#150

Post by djrogers »

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 )

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

Given that the W3C charter requires actual implementations in order for a standard to move forward, I'd have to say that no - entities other than those who might produce a significant implementation probably don't matter in this case.

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