171–180 of 386 posts
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Users should have a voice too.
They do: they pick which browser to run, and thus give power to.
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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. 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.
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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 h…
While I agree the W3C's insistence on maintaining a parallel spec. is a silly idea they should absolutely abandon, I fail to see how any but the most biased perspective could conclude that they are "hijacking" a process of their own. W3C haven't dropped anything from the WHATWG spec.: that's separate and out of their control. They can drop what they like from their copy, it's their copy. Unless you're proposing that the WHATWG should be running the W3C, I'm not sure what you're getting at with the term "hijack". Surely you can't hijack your own thing?
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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.
XHTML 1.0 didn't mandate so-called "draconian error-handling", it just offered it as an optional feature.
XHTML 1.1 (which was released but noone used) and XHTML 2 (which was never finished nor released) did mandate it. I wasn't a big fan of that decision, I don't think it would've worked, but XHTML 1.1 was still very usable while ignoring that one requirement; throwing out the baby with the bath water was a massive overreaction on the WHATWG's part.
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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.
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...
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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.
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
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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.
Once upon a time Microsoft had 90% of the browser’s market. We created web standards in order to prevent monopolies, such as the former IExplorer, from holding the market hostage. That’s the whole reason behind web standards.
And yes, they matter even with an IExplorer that has 90% market share, because governments can and do enforce adherence. That’s also the reason for why Microsoft came up with OOXML, ODF being a threat even with a tiny market share.
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 )
Well, the four objectors are responsible for browser engines that cover somewhere between 95 and 99+% of browser usage, depending on which set of stats you use and whether you count other browsers that have Chromium or Firefox upstream, including the system browsers of every major mobile and desktop OS.
So, no, in practice if those four agree on something, it is the way the web works.